Dean Bakopoulos
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($24)

by Will Wlizlo

Why are you unhappy? Is it something small, like an unpaid electric bill or an obnoxious television show? Perhaps your job’s a bore or your mother hates you? Or maybe there’s something bigger, some nebulous, draining zeitgeist hanging over the country that’s dragging you down with it? Like many of his contemporaries, Dean Bakopoulos tries to appraise the extent of the country’s psychological trauma caused by 9/11 and the ensuing years of ferocious politics with his latest novel, My American Unhappiness. Like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, My American Unhappiness teases out the perspective of over-educated, creative, middle-class liberals—but with a maudlin goofiness and without Franzen’s baggage of celebrity.

Protagonist Zeke Pappas is the day-drunk director at the helm of the Great Midwestern Humanities Initiative, a comically ambiguous non-profit whose sole purpose is to allocate government money to artists. Zeke’s personal obsession is “The Unhappiness Project,” a survey of thousands of people about what causes them distress. The overarching problem, Zeke summarizes, is that Americans have so much heartbreaking information at their disposal but no means of making a better world. “The more we know,” he says, “the more we risk opening ourselves up to this American unhappiness that I speak of; conversely, the more we try to understand, change, or manipulate the political views of our fellow citizens, the more unhappy and weary we become.” People are helpless, neutered of their agency—and that definitely includes Zeke.

While Zeke curates the dissatisfied ramblings of the nation, he struggles to find positive meaning in his own life. He’s constantly on the verge of losing his job, patron, aging mother, beloved nieces, and last chance at marriage. It seems like every corner he rounds he confronts another existential crisis. Waiting in line at a fast food restaurant, he has a dark epiphany. “This is the collective pulse of unhappy America,” he thinks, “right there in the Noodles at six forty-eight in suburban Madison, Wisconsin. These are the people that I don’t want to become. Oh, I think they have beautiful souls, all of that aimless yearning, all of that buried itch—but I know that is where I am headed; if I am not married in time, my own canvas will be a vast tableau of loneliness and banality, and I am terrified.” Zeke, like his 300 million countrymen, has some problems to work through.

Despite its title, My American Unhappiness is archly funny, a mix of deadpan sarcasm, whiskey-sodden one-liners, and over-the-top dramatics—the sort of outrageous behavior that makes you both cringe and chuckle in disbelief that smart people can make such astoundingly stupid decisions. Bad choices and histrionics aside, Zeke is a lovable lost soul. As he fumbles to find happiness in an America abstracted from its citizens, its history, and its ideals, one can’t hide their joy witnessing Zeke finally reconnect with his fellow citizens, his history, and his own ideals—and find real satisfaction in them.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

A. D. Miller
Anchor ($14.95)

by Malcolm Forbes

Miller’s debut novel concerns Nick Platt, a rootless Englishman up to his neck in lawless, modern-day Moscow. His hero becomes a victim of a scam and a victim in love and slides into moral meltdown. We read on wondering how, if at all, he will go about extricating himself and whether a stab at redemption is too late.

Miller, previously the Moscow correspondent for The Economist, has travelled all over the former Soviet Union, and his knowledge is in evidence throughout the book. The chaos of gangster-run Moscow has been depicted in countless thrillers over the last couple of decades, butSnowdrops stands out due in part to Miller having experienced the city for himself as a journalist. His professional background means he writes authoritatively on money, the dirty dealing and get-rich-quick ventures of the country’s “black gold rush.” More crucially he writes authentically on every facet of Moscow life, sprinkling the narrative with appropriate jargon: everything from krisha (the protective muscle needed to bully and intimidate and fight your battles to stay ahead) to Russian proverbs, slang, hand gestures, and even different snow types. (The snowdrops of the title refer to corpses hidden by the snow and only coming to light in a thaw.) As a result, the book is elevated above the usual vacuous first-person expat-abroad debuts, with credible detail being a product of insider knowledge.

Of course, detail alone cannot make a flawless work of fiction. Snowdrops’ vivid local color is marginally tarnished by a clutch of wrongheaded descriptions, and seriously marred by its narrator’s actions. In the case of the former, Miller sporadically lets slip ill-fitting collocations: Moscow’s poor wear “bleak trousers”; a station is not ornate but “frilly.” What are intended as clever turns of phrase often end up on the page as cheesy puns: a venal cop has a “cash-hither smile”; Ikea is now apparently as “inevitable in Moscow as death and tax evasion.” And yet when Miller gets it right he hits the mark: the thuggish Cossack is forever “outlined in violence” and a dyed-in-the-wool relic from the past wears “Soviet glasses” and “smelled of cigarettes and Brezhnev.” Miller’s mixed success at illustrating a scene can be encapsulated in his treatment of the simplest of objects and movements. On more than one occasion he has his characters “punch” numbers on intercoms to get through doors—shop-worn phrasing that is a staple of every hackneyed thriller. And yet Miller impresses by informing us that those very doors his characters live behind are axe-proof. With such neat observations, it’s a shame that his hard work is often undone by language that is either outlandish or banal.

Worse is his depiction of Nick as that stock thriller character, the foreigner out of his depth. His clouded judgement and all-too ready acceptance of Masha—a girl who holds him at a distance and keeps herself resolutely unknowable—not to mention his adherence to her scheme, even once he smells a rat, strains at the reader’s reserves of credulity. Nick could be naïve, of course, but Miller renders him downright gullible. It makes for strange reading: here is a book in which the setting comes alive just at the point when we stop believing in the narrator. It doesn’t help that the novel takes the form of a lengthy confession, an unburdening of the soul that Nick is compelled to write to his fiancée before their wedding. The problem with this approach is that it forces Nick to pepper his prose with life-line explanations: “MGU meant Moscow State University, Russia’s version of Oxford, but with bribes to get in”; “Patriarshie Prudy—Patriarch’s Ponds: the Hampstead of Moscow, with more automatic weapons.” The tag-on witticisms are at first enlightening but soon become wearying, and while these reference points are useful for the reader (and, presumably, the fiancée), many are redundant. “‘Poguliaem,’ I said. (Let’s walk.)” proves instructive but “‘Normalno,’ he replied. (Normal.)” is laughably patronizing. Even if his fiancée forgives Nick his egotism and cowardice, one wonders how long she will tolerate his condescension.

As Nick gets carried away with the drawn-out details of his confession, the novel becomes freighted with irrelevancies. We are shown a “snowdrop” at the beginning and so read on to discover its significance to the novel as a whole. Along the way Nick foreshadows his imminent fall from grace by drip-feeding us dark premonitions and dangling suggestive lures: “I hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, had I? Anything you could hold against me? Not really. Not yet.” The constant reminder that there is more back-story—“Looking back” is a common sentence-starter—after a while grows grating. When will we be propelled forward? But before anything dramatic materializes there is layer upon layer of padding to get through, mostly in the form of endless, meaningless sightseeing. Nick’s mother comes to visit and he shows her around St. Petersburg, but we learn nothing new about the city or the plot; in another side-trip, this time to Odessa (“a sort of cross between Tenerife and Palermo”), Nick does glean something valuable from Masha’s enigmatic life but, frustratingly, lacks the guts to question her and offer us clarity. Both sections, together with the excessive traipsing around the capital, are insightful in their own way, but seldom rise above being superfluous travelogues. Snowdrops is crippled by reportage, feeling in places like the author is determined to cut and paste every Russian experience into the narrative. We yearn for him to cut to the chase, but when he finally does, the punch he tries to pack is too telegraphed to knock us out.

Snowdrops is curious for being a thriller that isn’t thrilling, a slow-burn of a novel that nevertheless urges us to turn the pages. The corpse on the first page helps, but giving credit where it is due, so too does Miller’s prose, punctuated with those little nuggets of Moscow idiom and in-the-know fact. The novel’s inclusion on the 2011 Booker Prize short-list surprised many, prompting the judges to explain that their main criterion was “readability” over literary showmanship. (It is easy to imagine it appealing to the chair of the judging panel, former Director General of MI5 turned thriller writer Stella Rimington.) And Snowdrops is immensely readable. Whether that is a suitable requisite for winning a major literary prize belongs to a different discussion, but Miller deserves praise for the masterful way he has Nick build himself up, realize his own weaknesses, and then knock himself down.

“Depicting his moral decline—which is what the book is ultimately about—through his voice was tough,” Miller told The Guardian. “But I think the hardest part of any extended piece of writing is sustaining the morale of the author.” Snowdrops sounds like a hard-won battle, but for all its flaws we should be grateful that the author could keep his morale up long enough to chart his protagonist’s moral fall.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

China Miéville
Del Rey ($16)

by Nathaniel Forsythe

In the early 17th century, the Tokugawa shogunate that ruled Japan imposed the policy of sakoku, prohibiting all trade with westerners except through the artificial island of Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor. The shogun wanted commerce to be easier to control, to prevent rival clans from using foreign technologies to unseat him. He understood the power that stemmed from mastery over the means of communication.

In the powerful ninth novel by British fantasist China Miéville, we hear the story of the titular Embassytown, a trade city much like Dejima. Embassytown, however, is a human trading post on a planet belonging to an alien race called “The Hosts.” Where the Portuguese in Japan had their movement restricted by imperial edict, the humans of Embassytown are limited to a several-mile bubble of breathable air, kept in place by advanced alien technology. We are, in other words, in the realm of science fiction, albeit a particularly thought-provoking and elegant variety that suggests allegories without being bogged down in them.

Miéville’s story follows Avice, a native of Embassytown and a pilot for the trade ships that travel between the trade city and the other planets of a sprawling stellar empire. Embassytown is a backwater, its only valuable export the mysterious pieces of biotechnology grown by the Hosts. Avice is a direct, headstrong narrator, who takes most of the strangeness of her world as given. This makes for a somewhat rough learning curve for the reader, but pays off beautifully in the later phases of the novel, when Miéville begins to deconstruct this world he has so thoroughly depicted.

Avice views the Hosts with a justified mixture of awe and fear. They are, in the best sense of the word, true aliens. Nothing about them is remotely identifiable with humanity, from their vaguely arachnid physiology to their bizarre double mouths that speak simultaneously. The Hosts' minds are even stranger. Avice tells us, “I would never assume I understood the motivations of any [nonhuman], and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me.”

The Hosts' language is fundamental to their alien-ness: it works nearly-telepathically, precluding the possibility of lying. Avice's linguist husband explains that “for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.”

In order to negotiate trade agreements, the humans of Embassytown have genetically engineered sets of perfectly identical twins, called “Ambassadors,” who speak and think in near-enough to unison to communicate with the Hosts. The Hosts can't speak to non-Ambassador humans, and barely recognize them as sentient. Avice thinks the Hosts “sometimes watched us as if we were interesting, curious dust”. The Ambassadors, meanwhile, can discuss elaborate treaties with the Hosts, though even they are still tripped up by the Hosts' complex social dynamics.

The two-in-one Ambassadors, like Avice's erstwhile lover(s) CalVin, control all communication with the Hosts and, hence, control the colony. The distant imperial hegemony envies this direct control, and begins to create its own Ambassadors through bizarre psychic experimentation. As these new, mismatched Ambassadors arrive, their interactions with the Hosts quickly become perilous.

Avice is pulled into both these intrigues and the complexities of Host language when she is selected to become a “simile.” A group of Hosts is working to expand their linguistic possibilities by using humans to act out events, creating linguistic objects that can simultaneously be truth and comparison. They need the similes to express hypotheticals, to introduce the possibility of change into their society. “Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams.” Avice isn't terribly impressed with her new linguistic status, saying, “in the main my simile was used to describe a kind of making do” (actually very appropriate given her ruthless pragmatism).

The Hosts also invite Avice to watch them perform in one of Miéville's most inspired creations, “The Festival of Lies.” This Festival is half cultural exchange, half drug orgy. The human Ambassadors tell lies in their approximation of the Hosts' language, beginning with the simple: “that red chair is blue.” The cognitive dissonance from hearing untruths titillates and intoxicates the Hosts, and inspires the rebel faction to try to tell lies of their own. For them it is “an extreme sport”, one that offers possibilities for vast mental expansion. As the lies grow more elaborate, it becomes clear that the Hosts are trying to learn to tell stories.

The Festival of Lies is the kind of bizarre event you might expect from a fantasy novel, but it has an appealing directness and loads of allegorical potential to unpack. The psychedelic fantasias of Miéville's early novels, such as Perdido Street Station, were sometimes overwhelming, and too often acted as baroque shells for the kind of standard, adventure-driven plots still prevalent in genre fiction. Embassytown is truly a novel of ideas, in which the final battle is waged not between warring space frigates but between competing theories about language and learning. The fate of both the humans and the Hosts depends on their ability to communicate, to find a common denominator of expression and connect across their chasm of understanding, a distance at least equal to that between stars. Linguistics has rarely been this dramatic.

Miéville performs impressive feats here, adroitly exploring a nexus of language, storytelling, and political change. Just as when the Portuguese carracks made anchor at Dejima, we see with brutal specificity how opening channels of communication can enrich some, liberate others, and kill millions. And in showing us all this, Miéville suggests the value of novels such as this one: that a finely crafted lie can be more valuable than truth, and that one might even save the world.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

John Sayles
McSweeney’s ($29)

by Joshua Willey

It is the perfect moment for a novel like the latest from filmmaker John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun. As the ephemeral euphorias of social networking begin to wane and election season begins to wax, a tome of literary historical fiction might provide many with an encouraging reminder of the depth of American roots and the breadth of American identity. Though the title is regrettably close to the classic Montgomery Clift/Elizabeth Taylor film A Place in the Sun, Sayles’s new work conjures a time we’d be well advised to remember, if only to understand our own more coherently. Divided into three sections, the nearly thousand pages total over a hundred chapters; the book combines the research and scope of a James Michener doorstop with the edge and lyricism of a tome by Wallace Stegner. There is as much Ken Burns here as Kelly Reichardt, as much Zane Grey as Larry McMurtry, as much Jack London as Jack Kerouac.

Furthermore, Sayles’s novel fills a little gap in the interests of the American historical popular curiosity. While the Civil War and even Reconstruction are regularly mythologized, and prohibition is of enough interest to have generated a highly publicized HBO series and a PBS documentary in the last couple years, the turn of the century, from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, is perhaps neglected. This was the era when America burst her borders with overseas wars and frontier expansion and redefined her culture with industrial and political revolution, and Sayles deftly recreates that time in his book.

“Everywhere there’s a river in this country, there’s a railroad along side it,” Sayles writes, and the parallel between geographical and human topography is indeed close to the center of the novel. In the same instance as Sayles chronicles human society’s increasing insulation from the natural world, he reminds us how embedded our evolution is within the landscape. Though it seems we look less and less at place as important—everyone already seems everywhere in the Internet age—it is good to remember that deep connections to the ground beneath our feet need to be nurtured, even if the reasons to do so are unclear.

In “Cantos for James Michener,” poet David Berman writes “God created forest clearings so he could spy on the Indians.” This is precisely the type of humor that not only makes A Moment in the Sun infinitely readable but also poetic. As in Berman’s semi-ironic homage to what the historical brand evokes in the American pop-consciousness, Sayles’s novel shows that history is not, despite what the romantic imagination desires, a march from some utopian primordial ooze of simplicity towards an ever more anxious era of technological domination, spiritual vacuity, and an increasingly invisible present. The present might in fact be at the true center of A Moment in the Sun. The sweeping forces of colonialism and development are still, for all their squalor, slow. So read this book slowly. It will be over before you know it.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Florence Howe
The Feminist Press ($24.95)

by E. J. Levy

A perennial problem of modern American feminism, Susan Faludi convincingly claimed in Harper’s last year, is that it’s matricidal. Whereas in the nineteenth century, mothers—charged with being a republican force in the domestic sphere—collaborated with daughters to win rights, such bonds suffered after suffrage: within a year of winning the vote, young women were publicly dismissing mom (egged on by advertising), increasingly convinced that overthrowing the maternal past was the real road to freedom. We haven’t stopped. The risk of such a matricidal tradition, of course, is that we will forsake the wisdom of our forebears, dooming ourselves to repeat their past.

So it’s a mixed relief to read Florence Howe’s poignant memoir of coming of age as a feminist in mid-twentieth-century America during the heyday of the Second Wave Feminist revolution. Howe is best known as a founder of Women’s Studies and The Feminist Press; as a witness account of the emergence of both, this would make a worthy read. But it’s the personal story of coming into a conscious life, the struggle to forge a self, which makes A Life in Motion such a moving book. A tonic to our cultural inclination toward forgetting, the memoir is a bridge to the past, a useful reminder of how hard won and recently minted our liberty is; it offers a crucial generational link in an age when feminism has become a dirty (or worse, risible) word and popular debates rage over bikini waxing rather than equal pay—i.e., when the optimistic delusion that we live in a post-sexist era has gripped the nation.

Fortunately this is not an eat-your-peas memoir: it’s a hell of a good story, rich in remarkable anecdote, well told even as it tells us much about how the transformative fights for women’s and African-American civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s were won. The book opens on a vivid account of growing up poor in Brooklyn, daughter of a fierce if frustrated mother and a charming, depressive father who drove a cab but instructed his daughter to say he was “in the transportation business.” Beloved by a grandmother who died when Howe was young, she relates a childhood of loneliness and lack in which a friend’s feather bed seemed an exotic comfort (Howe slept on a cot in the kitchen); where she was tutored in Hebrew by her grandfather, who thanked God each day in his Orthodox prayers that he was not born a woman; how she mysteriously contracted a vaginal infection and spent ten months in a hospital, released only when she began to menstruate. Parts could have been written by the Brothers Grimm.

In America, we are fond of the myth that we can grow up to be anything, but few books reckon with how costly success can be, how much of one’s family one must forsake, how lonely and difficult the journey often is. Howe’s does; her frank assessment of the struggle to claim her life—not only from patriarchy but from personal doubt—is the book’s true heroism. Urged to attend graduate school, she remains convinced that she is meant to be no more than a school teacher; having excelled at graduate school, she declines to finish her dissertation in favor of following her husband’s career; offered a chance to write for the New Yorker, she squanders the opportunity in a collaboration with a male lover; invited to apply for the position of president of Bennington College, she insists on splitting the position with her husband, who refuses the position at the interview, nixing her shot at the job. Over and over Howe declines opportunities, thwarted by patriarchy but also by a psychology that will be deeply familiar to many ambitious women (or anyone who’s seen the movie Black Swan). How to succeed without betraying those you love?

The book strives to encompass the whole of Howe’s life, from her Brooklyn childhood to her work as publisher of The Feminist Press. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and important at a time when many take women’s rights for granted. Running almost 600 pages, the book is helpfully structured into four sections: A Family Girl, about her early childhood; The Care of the Future, about her studies at Hunter and Smith, her four marriages, her father’s suicide, and adoption of an African-American daughter; Work That Changed My Life, about becoming a founder of women’s studies and The Feminist Press and its development multiculturally and internationally; and Friendships Into Family, comprising portraits of her mother, friendships that have sustained her, and members of her chosen family. Along the way, she usefully reveals the role Civil Rights played in developing women’s studies and how feminists excavated women’s lives and forged their own.

A Life in Motion founders, however, when Howe relinquishes chronology in favor of thematic chapters on her marriages, her father’s suicide, and her daughter’s adoption. The loss of chronology ultimately muddles meaning, obscuring how personal events informed political and professional choices. She mentions connections among these, but doesn’t mine them fully. Later, the intimate tone of the book’s first half gives way to important but less gripping documentation of the evolution of The Feminist Press and women’s studies, in an account that is historically significant but feels at times like a feminist rendition of Biblical begats.

Howe is well known as an editor, so it’s hard not to wish that she’d had a better one. Gripping as the book is, it could easily and profitably have been two: one a history of The Feminist Press, the other a powerful memoir of coming of age and into political consciousness as the nation was coming into post-war power. It’s also hard not to notice Howe’s own matricidal moments. She blames her mother and female teachers for impeding her progress, for convincing her early on that she could aspire only to teach school, that she hadn’t a creative bone in her body. Men will do far worse, but these women’s voices frame the story, providing the opening coordinates, against which New Yorker editor William Shawn stands as an emblematic man inviting her into a larger world. It would be an oversimplification to suggest that this is the fulcrum on which the book pivots, but it’s hard not to notice when the pattern repeats. Despite her powerful bonds with women, in the most powerful and intimate early chapters, the blame is often laid at female feet.

One is left to wonder what Howe might have written, if in addition to nurturing other women’s voices, she had nurtured her own. “Half a lifetime ago . . . I began to see the Feminist Press as a way into a lost history,” Howe writes of the press that would help recover remarkable stories of women’s lives; Howe’s book is a luminous contribution that helps light the way back so we can see how we got here and how much has been gained, how much there is to lose, and how we—mothers and daughters, second- and third- and fourth-wave feminists, here and abroad—might yet manage to go forward together.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Erik Larson
Crown ($26)

by Rebecca Morales

It is easy to wonder how Hitler gained so much power so quickly, and with so little resistance. While the details of his ascent are described in countless biographies and the warning signs are recounted in every book of World War II history, In the Garden of Beasts takes a fresh approach. The latest book by Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City, is a personal and relatable story, filled with the excitement of revolution, the sounds and smells of 1930s Berlin, and the practical details of an American family’s adjustment to German life.

Larson tells the story of William Dodd, a college professor and historian, and the U.S. ambassador to Germany during Hitler’s rise to power. Dodd had no diplomatic experience and considered his life’s work the writing of a four-volume history of the old south. An unusual character, thrifty and modest in the face of German excess, he was not the first choice for the position and met resistance from the “old boys club” atmosphere of U.S. diplomats. He travelled to Germany with his wife and his adult children in hopes of reuniting the family, who approached the trip like an extended vacation. The book’s focus is narrow and its story brief, centered personally on the ambassador and his family. Through the eyes of these relatively ordinary Americans, the reader gains an inside perspective into life in Berlin and into Hitler’s government.

Foremost among the fascinating elements of the book is the gradual dawning of horror that the American family in Berlin experiences. The reader’s historical retrospect adds to the sense of a growing threat, and Larson’s complex intertwining of plotlines maximizes the effect. Larson draws the reader in to his suspenseful narrative by provoking our curiosity at the end of a chapter, then beginning a new chapter on a divergent plotline. While this can be frustrating, it is more often tantalizing, and maintains a sense of continuity through rapidly interwoven subjects. The book’s masterful construction disintegrates with a disappointingly abrupt last section, but ultimately fits Larson’s aims—to follow the story of the Dodd family rather than be dragged off into another history of World War II.

At the heart of the story is Martha, Ambassador Dodd’s twenty-four-year-old daughter. To Martha, a trip to Berlin at the beginning of a revolution is an exciting adventure, and the young Nazi officers intent on reviving their country are the objects of romantic fascination. An attractive, liberal young woman, she becomes a Berlin society girl and has affairs with several political and social figureheads. Her story provides the romance and much of the entertainment, and is filled with surprising, enlightening, and very human stories about the head of the Gestapo, the foreign press chief, and even an attempted match between Martha and Hitler. She befriends the liberal elite as well as prominent Nazis, and has no regard for the danger of speaking against the regime. Her story turns from a society girl romp abroad to an epic love story when she meets a Soviet spy, and eventually toys with the idea of spying herself. Martha’s sections are fascinating, infinitely readable, and best at showing the alternating excitement and fear that makes the family’s story so unusual.

In some ways the book reads like an apology for Dodd, an historical pardoning of a man who ultimately met with professional disgrace. While Dodd shows fortitude in a speech about the dangers of controlling governments, he is easily swayed by Nazi propaganda. His belief in the basic goodness of men and in his own ability to council Hitler back to reason postpone the U.S.’s acknowledgment of a German threat, but Larson focuses on the snobbery of Dodd’s detractors, allowing Dodd to remain a sympathetic character.

As in Larson’s other books, the author demonstrates a remarkable ability to engage the history buff and the novice alike. His writing is detailed, engaging, and easy to read, even when densely packed with information. An odd mix of sensationalism and education, the book is filled with details about public officials, the landscape of Berlin, and the personal troubles and triumphs of the Dodd family, but it never loses its energy in minutia. Larson’s engaging writing makes this work of nonfiction read like a novel, one that is very difficult to put down.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012

Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza
Translated by George Shriver
Verso Books ($39.95)

by Vladislav Davidzon

The apartment in which I write this essay stands on a central street in a major post-Soviet, Eastern European city—a street once named after the incomparable Rosa Luxemburg. It does not matter which city, because every city in the Soviet Union had one. Though Soviet citizens could be forgiven for not quite knowing why this was so. Luxemburg was a sanctified saint of the revolution in a way she would never have been if she had lived to see the Revolution’s second birthday or to denounce its moral abominations any more than the little she had time to do. After Stalin forbade the publication of her books in 1931, “Luxenburgism” became a reviled sobriquet of sectarian contempt for schismatic tendencies, only rivaled by “Trotskyism’’ in insidiousness. The bogeyman who scares children before bed, it was an injunction to toe the party line and a criminal referent amidst a permutation of clattering, contradictory others. Running afoul of a purge one could be prosecuted, for example as an American agent, a counter revolutionary, Luxemburgian Revisionist, a currency-hoarding, French-sympathizing, anti-Soviet saboteur.

A large batch of Luxemburg’s letters, perhaps a majority, was kept under the proverbial lock and key in Moscow at the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History. A fact that has gone unremarked in the Anglophone literary sphere is how much their publication now is an effect of, testament to, and justification of the opening up of the Russian archives. These letters were deemed unacceptable and remained unpublishable for exactly six decades, thirteen years longer then her life. Paradoxically, this is one of the many reasons that “Red Rosa” remains of the few major communist intellectuals to remain untainted by the later outcome of events.

Correspondence was her sustenance and a basic fact of life for her, kept up daily, and consequently forms a large part of a vast oeuvre. Her work (especially her economic work) is still scandalously under-translated, but this volume is the opening salvo of a collected works to be brought into English collaboratively by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Karl Dietz Veralg, and Verso Books. Though we do not lack biographies, especially in French and German, this collection offers a litany of new insights into her character and her quick evolution as thinker and political insurgent.

Luxemburg was born in the exquisite Mannerist-Renaissance gem town of Zamość, Poland, a Jewish subject of the Russian empire. Diminutive and sickly in the Proustian manner, she was something of an invalid dreamer from her childhood onward. Manifested from an early age also was the indomitable thirst for social justice. Her identification with simple, impoverished Polish workers remained the fundament of an idealistic belief in the basic decency and agency of the working class. Her mythical eloquence, coupled with fiery charisma in front of a crowd, earned her quick ascendancy through the party hierarchy. The letters alight her myriad contradictions.

Steeped lustfully in her self-willed German culture—the first thing she does when she gets to Berlin after her Swiss studies is to acquire German citizenship through a marriage of convenience, deportation being a serious liability in her profession—she rather marvelously mocks the “Swabians,” the German “idiots and sleepyheads,” the Prussians with their “arrogant demeanor, as if each one had swallowed the stick previously used for beating him!” An entertaining subplot of the book is Luxemburg’s wry astonishment at the cultural chauvinism of even the most learned and humane of the German Democratic Socialist Party leadership, whose principal “opinion [is] that one cannot do the Polish workers a greater favor than to Germanize them, but one may not say this publicly.” The SDP would continually defund Polish socialist newspapers in the Prussian occupied provinces for the “crime” of bringing up the “Polish question.” One is forced to acknowledge two particularly Russian intuitions: the first being that the exemplars of the highest expression of humanist idealism love the world but very often do not particularly like anybody in it (perhaps the moral of the romantic 19th-century Russian literature from which Luxemburg sprang); the second being that one should never trust a German. Of particular interest for the connoisseur of historical intrigue and a minor cause for glee is one of the last letters of the collection, an espionage missive sent to support Fred Fuch’s secret trip to meet with Lenin in December 1918: “Dear Vladimir, I am taking advantage of ‘uncle’s trip’. . .”

There is an undeniable incongruity to her gentleness and the gashes she induced with her rapaciously sharpened elbows while jostling with men for respect as a theoretician. Sheathed in the impenetrable armor of unbending self-certainty on the outside, and waging incessant internal purifying battles against factional deserters, equivocators, scoundrels, predatory opportunists (of these there are hordes to dispatch, mostly mediocrities), and reformists (a more dangerous genus, composed of some of the most talented) within the international movement, she is the girliest of 18th-century girls at her romantic core. She is co-dependent, a socialist hero worshipper, moody, frilly, self-deprecating. Despite the valiant efforts of several generations of feminists, she is an utterly lost cause to that movement. She couldn’t stand to see women riding bicycles (because it is “seldom aesthetically pleasing. I am terribly old-fashioned, as you see, and even ‘philistinesque,’ [‘philistros’],” she berates the Dutch feminist Henriette Roland Holst, willfully ignoring the fact that Dutch socialists come out of the womb on bicycles). We always knew that she had seduced Clara Zetkin’s son Konstantin when he was half her age, but until now we did not know that the usually dour, depressive, distant Leo Jogiches had threatened to not “let me go and declares that he would sooner kill me” on a bus trip through Poland. (Her sadly cloying, futile love letters to an emotionally unavailable workaholic take up the first decade of the correspondence.)

Her correspondence with a Jewish Bundist would in modern times get her labeled a “self- hating Jew.” She would have of course replied to the charge, as one always does, that she did not hate herself for being Jewish, only certain other, insufferable, Jews. Indeed, over the matter of Jewish emancipation she is quite unequivocally universalist: “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch.” That familiar debate repeats itself a century later, ad nauseum, between “universal Jews” and “Jewish Jews” with the Palestinian question. This is a logical emanation of her internationalism and the fact that she is not keen to embrace any one of the strands of her myriad identities at the expense of totality—the very idea of identity politics being a dead end, if not an outright manifestation of false consciousness.

The various party schisms and maneuvers, the schematics of tactical feints and internecine internal politicking of the bygone world of socialist Europe, are here laid out in their full glory. Though let it be said that Luxemburg was never a partisan of the petty party fragmentation and habitual leftwing schismatacism . The sense that half of Berlin would skewer its mother and eat the other half raw for an editorial position at the Vorwärts, Berliner Volksblatt is alleviated by the collection’s enticing taste of the internal disputations of the golden era of the great Marxist ideological debates. Kautsy vs. Bernstein, Prolecult vs. the Lunacharskian cultural apparatus, the theory of attrition vs. General strikes, Blanc and Guizet vs. Mignet and Cunow on the interpretation of the French Revolution—one can follow along with her as thinks through the issues of the day and the problems of classical Marxism and pours torrents of abuse on her prevaricating enemies. This might be a hindrance for the general reader. That Luxemburg was one of the great spirits of her age is without doubt, but if the entertainment value and intellectual frisson of the specter of a young Luxemburg declining to translate an article of Plekhanov’s for lack of time does not strike one as thrilling, one should read the letters of Rilke or Voltaire instead.

Written in a mixture (sometimes in the same missive) of Polish, Russian, German and Yiddish, with portions in her workmanlike French, the book is a work of titanic scholarship. The collection is gathered together from archives in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, Moscow, Antwerp, Bonn, and represents the largest collection of her letters ever published in English. There are huge gaps, of course. The majority of the Polish letters were immolated in the Warsaw Blitzkrieg. No letters of French provenance are available. And much remains in private hands; the editors plead outright with keepers of unknown letters to come forth in the introduction. Another flaw of the book is that the original language of individual letters is not always indicated, and in certain cases can be gleaned only through the nationality of the correspondent and by deduction from the location of the archive it is housed in. The book also lacks a chronology, though the rest of bibliography is exemplary.

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg does not betray its times without proffering a terminal force majeure. The narrative picks up speed and trajectory and flies along the axis of a historical epic, slowly building toward a grand and grandly tragic denouement. The letters after 1910 gain urgency in direct parallel to events in Europe. With ever mounting disillusion that Europe’s working classes can be kept from butchering each other in fratricidal conflict in defense of reactionary regimes, she unremittingly breaks Prussian law by making pacifist speeches. Promptly arrested, she spends the First World War in prison. We read her pen a series of heartbreaking condolence letters as friends, comrades, and former lovers are killed on the Western front. Released under a general amnesty for political prisoners in January 1919, she throws herself back into organizing the German wing of the revolution blooming all over Europe. Though she heartily and knowingly opposed the unprepared and doomed Spartacist uprising, she was outvoted, and threw her energies into the fray anyway. The rebellion was quickly crushed, its leaders tracked down and arrested.

On January 15, while waiting with Karl Liebknecht to be taken back to prison in the back of a police wagon, members of the counterrevolutionary and protofascist Freikorps, the embryonic nucleus of the Nazi shock troops, executed them both. Her body was infamously dumped into a canal, recovered only some decades later. Her grave is now a place of pilgrimage. She is beloved by anarchists. Her letter on Goethe, written from prison during the bleakest days of the war, is the book’s finest distillation of her creed and the manner in which she strove to live her life:

. . . at the same time how calmly, with such equanimity, he pursued his studies about the metamorphosis of plants, the theory of colors, and a thousand other things. I don’t ask that you be a poet like Goethe, but everyone can adopt for themselves his outlook on life—the universalism of interests, the inner harmony—or at least strive toward that. And if you say something like: but Goethe was not a political fighter, my opinion is this: a fighter is precisely a person who must strive to rise above things, otherwise one’s nose will get stuck in every bit of nonsense.

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Roberto Simanowski
University of Minnesota Press ($25)

by Chris Funkhouser

Digital Art and Meaning begins by responding to Roy Ascott’s concept of “telematic embrace,” challenging the general proclivity to assign production of meaning solely to an artwork’s audience; to the contrary, this book boldly proclaims how it “embraces the advances of the critic.” In various ways, Roberto Simanowski precisely uses his pro-critical stance to assemble a rejection of the common notions of “embrace” that occur as media and art are blended, establishing a polemic that privileges a “methodology” of close reading that resists its more imposing or absolutist implications.

Simanowski bestows high expectations on his subject, which he scrutinizes with intellectual rigor. His knowledge of the foremost issues of digital expression, explored through chapters focused on Digital Literature, Kinetic Concrete Poetry, Text Machines, Interactive Installations, Mapping Art, and Real-Time Web Sculpture, is global. Simanowski successfully addresses the main concerns of digital artistry and writing, using examples of relevant works such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain, Eduardo Kac’s Genesis, and Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post (to name only a fraction of works explored) to illustrate how new aesthetic possibilities serve to make meaning for audiences. Further, while outlining the interpretive skills necessary for approaching contemporary works, he cultivates cognitive methods readers can use to develop competency in reading mediated expression in a range of forms. If that isn’t enough to attract attention to the book, Simanowski’s personal passion for tango also plays a small but interesting role in the narrative.

Digital Art and Meaning accurately proclaims the importance of paying attention to, “what can be done on the level of code to understand and assess the semantics of a digital artifact” as well as “to the specificities of particular works.” Readers interested in both succinct articulations about finite creative details and theoretical considerations of the subject will be pleased. Simanowski, while offering insightful practical observations on artworks, also builds larger historical frameworks; for instance, the chapter on Concrete Poetry dwells on its relationship to thebaroque. Likewise, beyond examining semantics on a linguistic level, this book proceeds to examine the “semantics of the link” and other aspects of artistic exchange, providing a deeper understanding of mechanisms many readers (or viewers) may not be mindful of. “Digital literature,” writes Simanowski, “is only digital if it is not only digital”; today we must “read not only the words but also what happens to them.” As do several other high profile critics, he delves into how bodies play a role in the reception of work—ostensibly because a culture of meaning has become a culture of presence, which we bodily occupy—yet by acknowledging “bodily sensation and experience must not be our final consideration,” and touching on many other issues (including erotics and the avant-garde) he successfully expands discourse on the subject.

Simanowski displays an exemplary ability to connect process and result in digital artworks. At its most theoretical moments, his arguments become less tangible (and perhaps lose importance) for a general audience, and the work necessary to traverse these sections may not be rewarded by relative substance for everyone. Nonetheless, with regard to its perspective on the performance of language—a primary concern in digital and electronic literature—the book introduces valuable new perspectives. It would be impossible for a single observer to right, in hindsight, the critical wrongs (or misconceptions) of those writing before him, but Simanowski’s overall expansion of the methodological framework, in every discussion attending to multiple levels of inquiry, without question has the positive impact of beginning to point the critical fields in digital art and writing towards a more pluralistic, comprehensive orientation.

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Dubravka Ugresic
translated by David Williams
Open Letter ($15.95)

by Steve Street

Considering the scope of references in this twelfth book and fifth collection of essays, the originally Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic might well have come across Kurt Vonnegut’s dictum that a writer must above all be a good date—i.e. good company for a reader. She seems to believe it, anyway, though like the opinions she expresses on everything from the ramifications of digital culture to hotel furnishings to insects, she’s more complicated than that. In fact she’s less like a good date than like a good childhood friend who still lives nearby and drops in often, with urgent topics on her mind. Luckily what’s on Ugresic‘s mind is mostly new and engaging, especially for readers of this new American edition. But her strong presence—voice is really inadequate to her—in pieces that range from the hundred-page title essay to two-page reflections on a single observation, can cause some annoyance.

For example, readers might be put off by a confidential tone that assumes they’ll agree with her. A museum in her adoptive Netherlands displays only “exemplars of the worst kind of pretentiousness,” end of anecdote; she doesn’t even describe, let alone argue how so. Of atrocities she cites as indications of increasing worldwide chaos and immorality she’ll offer undocumented generalizations like “many Indians sell their organs” and assertions of scores of slave-labor networks in western Europe. For all her own insistence on calling what she sees as she sees it rather than as she’s been expected to by the chain of insistent authorities under whom she’s lived, from Tito to Croatian nationalists to organizers and patrons of the “literary festivals that [now] criss-cross the European continent,” she seems to be writing to a remarkably uncritical audience. And sometimes she’s just wrong, as in “literary magazines are so few as to be of no use. . .” (They might be useless, but they’re everywhere, no?).

Not that she doesn’t provide evidence, sometimes even to a fault. In the second-longest essay here, “A Question of Perspective,” she details her version of why she left Croatia, essentially to avoid what amounted intellectual bullying by other writers and academics in a nationalistic fervor after the break-up of Yugoslavia. As Phillip Lopate points out in his canonical Art of the Personal Essay, this form’s “enemy . . . is self-righteousness,” though it’s true that Ugresic’s blow-by-blow of escalating injustices and betrayals also limns a dynamic that’s one of her larger themes: the way systems that supplant others can perpetuate systemic evils.

That’s hardly a fresh insight, and even on less overtly political topics she sometimes relies on the trite sarcasm of a splenetic adolescent, often of the “Oh they think they’re so cool” variety, especially when it comes to cultural trends. Some of this effect might well be due to the nature of translation, though David Williams’ work is faultless in terms of clarity and readability. But as Ugresic herself says of a writer in the Croatian in which she wrote these essays, “I . . . recognize the nuances and tones. I catch the scent of every word . . . I know that every word . . . [and] every sentence . . . is just a new layer of powder on its owner’s face.” Her accusation is of hypocrisy, and while that’s not one of her own apparent faults, her prose might well have gotten similarly scrubbed down a bit somewhere along the line.

But her passions are intact, as we become increasingly aware. Besides hypocrisy, she’s against cruelty, greed, injustice, and exploitation; what she’s for, if doing is endorsing, includes curiosity and an indefatigable quest for truth. More than anything, this credentialed comp-lit academic turned self-described cultural critic hates what she interprets as having come about as a consequence of the downfall of Communism and the ascendancy of global business and technology over any political ideology at all: the particular kind of cultural boorishness she dubs “karaoke culture.” In brief, her coinage indicates an Internet- and YouTube-enabled assumption worldwide that everyone not only can make art, but should. “Author, Work, and Reader are the three elements that create a literary work,” she instructs us in a section of the title essay called “Karaoke Writing” that treats fan fiction, slash fiction, and the cell-phone novel that “has rocked the powerful Japanese multimedia industry”; “Author and Work have had their time, and now it’s the Reader’s turn.” And elsewhere: “We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives.”

The difference she perceives is that contemporary culture, whether global or locally (and transparently) manufactured by emerging systems and structures, is, in inverse proportion to its prevalence, empty. She illustrates with a hypothetical runner carrying a ceremonial porcelain bowl that turns out to contain “water soup,” and by citing actual offbeat museums (of Odd Socks, of Toilets) that upend the concept of preserving cultural traditions and excellence. It’s not a simple question of high versus low: though not by name, she cites Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao. The containers become more important than the contents, she says, and mentions world-class violinist Joshua Bell, who can fill Carnegie Hall but was largely ignored when he played incognito in a subway station (viewable, ironically enough, on YouTube).

Her approach varies between academic vocabulary with full argumentation and the kind of visceral epiphanies drawn from casual observations you might expect over a back-yard fence. “In this private big brother show, this public big brother show, we record everything. . . [but] we don’t communicate.” In “Filipinas,” her one-dimensional revulsion at women in nightclubs seems moralistic and easily shocked, even prudish. For all her eschewing of ready-made concepts like loyalty to “homeland”—even that word makes her flesh crawl—she expresses an absolute allegiance to the poor. Her sensibility is a sort of “mash-up” (a technique of karaoke culture she criticizes) of Fran Leibowitz’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s, with maybe a dash of David Foster Wallace’s, in her burrowing for the truth. Like all of them she can be insightful, though not always intentionally. She’s so conversant with current culture that she seems younger, but she admits she comes from the post-World War II generation in a then-Communist country, so she’s watched systems both political and cultural from inception to collapse.

She’s also lived in times and places where, “because of the written word, writers have lost their lives and been put to death.” That’s maybe her biggest difference from Americans, whether writers or readers. For those of us who grew up postmodern, whether ironic or post-ironic, it can take a George Saunders-like wit to awaken feeling, as in his 2005 GQ piece on Dubai, “The New Mecca”—rather than the memory of a world in which decency and justice were considered achievable social goals, toward which writing could help. For all her savvy perceptions, Ugresic writes as if out of nostalgia for those earnest beliefs, and for all her particular dislikes and closely considered evidence she admits to wandering, “dazed and confused, around [a] vanished system of coordinates. East and West definitely no longer exist. . . . the world has split into the rich, who enrich themselves globally, and the poor, who are impoverished locally.”

Borderless as her concerns are, hers is a perspective forged in the part of the world she knew first, and she has much to teach us about it, especially if you couldn’t quite follow Balkan events in the 1990s—as well as, in an extensive compendium in her own academic specialty, about regional Croatian literature that even two centuries ago was partially set elsewhere. Ugresic herself is too, of course, as a resident of Amsterdam now and a world traveler—her first collection of essays was written in New York City, and two pieces in Karaoke Culture address trips to the Philippines and Bali. But her real points of reference are Japanese films and those of the Coen brothers, Sinclair Lewis and Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, Tito and Obama, Facebook and Twitter.

So by the end of Karaoke Culture you’ve developed a new respect for your childhood friend: she’s turned out to be as up-to-date as you are if not more so, speaking with traces of an intriguing, not-quite-identifiable accent you’d tuned out long ago. And you might wonder what else you’ve missed.

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Andrzej Stasiuk
translated by Michael Kandel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($23)

by Amy Henry

Small countries should be allowed to cut history class. They should be like islands off to the side of the main current of progress.

Driving out of Poland, Andrzej Stasiuk is again ready to explore the remote and often mysterious villages of Eastern Europe. He’s covered this lesson plan before, inFado (Dalkey Archive, 2009), where his quiet travels took the long way around to places that maps ignore. In On the Road to Babadag, he continues to explore “the other Europe” to discover what makes people there survive despite being forgotten or ignored by the rest of the continent. His pace is slow and observant, with a writing style that mimics the region: spare, straightforward, and honest.

There are countless ways to write a travelogue, and the writers of such usually proclaim a love for the places they visit. At times, however, the travel story becomes their story, more about their reactions to a place than the location itself. Only Stasiuk, along with Tony Fabijancic (writing about Croatia and Bosnia), seems to recognize that the stories belong to the inhabitants and aren’t there to be manipulated by outsiders and processed into anecdotes.

Stasiuk writes from observation: he rises early and quietly finds a cup of coffee and watches people go about their lives. He misses nothing: the gait of the already-tired worker, the way the shops put on their faces as the day begins, even how a tired man drinks his liquor. He doesn’t judge the people he observes, or imagine what could have been different politically. No matter where he ends up, he seems to pinpoint a simplicity and contentment uncommon to Western lands:

At that same hour, in that same dying light, cattle were coming home . . . Scenery and architecture may change, and the breed, and the curve of horn or the color of mane, but the picture remains untouched: between two rows of houses moved a herd of sated cattle . . . The “worst and smallest” nations live with their animals, and would like to be saved with them. They would like to be respected with their livestock, because they have little else.

What comes from this work is an appreciation for the small and simple but ultimately noble deeds of strangers. When he inquires of an elderly man about a certain train’s departure, he finds, hours later, that the man followed to make sure he got on the right one. In another city, a street kid advised him to avoid his intended hotel, suggesting another. Stasiuk doesn’t fall for it, thinking it a setup; it turns out his original choice was uninhabitable and the one the boy recommended was preferable, being clean and safe. This same boy helps him change his money, get a packed meal, and make the train on time without taking a dime for his efforts. Finally, he tells of an old woman on a lonely country road who has little to her name but finds a sense of purpose by scrubbing down the street anytime a car passes.

Stasiuk is the ultimate road trip companion; he’s thorough in his knowledge about the region’s people and culture, but he also knows when to keep quiet and just admire the view. The historical context is always present, as it has to be in this part of the world. Many Westerners assume that Eastern European history is just war and genocide, with a bit of Count Dracula thrown in. Ignoring the stereotypes, Stasiuk notes philosophers and poets inspired by the variance of light that appears in these hills and valleys. At one point, he sidetracks to find the grave of Emil Cioran, a Romanian poet and author who was a contemporary of Eliade, Sebastian, and Ionescu in the 1930s and for whom preserving the Romanian identity was vital.

All is not bucolic though; Stasiuk also investigates the culture clash in Chisinau, where the availability of Western goods intersects the most humble of farmer’s markets. It’s not so much the disparity but how he describes it that makes it instantly recognizable: “a Romanian-Slavic mix of loveliness and risqué makeup: peasant modesty in dance-hall gear. The general impression that everyone is playing at being something other, each according to a private notion of a world not here.” His description corresponds perfectly to how modernization in the larger cities is awkwardly positioned between Western influences and old-world traditions.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2011/2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2011/2012