Michael Schiavone
The Permanent Press ($28)

by Soo Young Lee

At the heart of Michael Schiavone’s debut novel Call Me When You Land is a fractured family pulsating with quiet desperation. Single mother Katie Olmstead receives the news that her estranged ex-husband Craig, father to her teenage son C.J., has died of a heart attack and left behind for them a Harley-Davidson Road King. Katie sees the motorcycle for what it may mean to C.J.—escape from her. Personal demons of failure swim to the surface as she struggles to hold onto a son grappling with the death of a father he never knew, a son that readily disregards and spurns her affections. While C.J. vents his anger on the hockey rink, Katie numbs her sorrows with Grand Marnier.

Schiavone writes skillfully and with purpose. There is as much (if not more) meaning in what he doesn’t say as in what he does. The brusque exchanges between mother and son underscore the painfully vast distance between them. The author also often sets up a scene then immediately enriches it with flashbacks, the constant shifts in time is reflecting the pasts that pervasively haunt the characters’ presents. Schiavone’s attention to details in portraying ordinary events (a hockey match, a night of bartending) may seem merely practical, but such details serve to convey the searing realities—C.J.’s repressed rage, Katie’s agonizing self-hatred—that underlie these events.

While plot lines about dysfunctional families have been done to the point of exhaustion, Schiavone masterfully develops his characters with human depth and complexity. Craig is not merely ‘the deadbeat dad’ who abandons the family, nor Caroline ‘the uptight sister,’ C.J. ‘the angsty teenager,’ and Katie ‘the alcoholic mother.’ Harsh one moment and tender the next, each of these well-drawn figures surprise us with their humanity and depth. Schiavone compels us to care about them, their wounds and triumphs reflecting many of our own.

Ultimately, Call Me When You Land paints a poignant and gripping story of a fractured psyche, of a mother terrified of losing the one defense against herself—her son: “Often she’s romanticized the future freedom, her parental parole, but in her bones she knows a sudden privacy will cut deep. With him, C.J. will take her understanding of consequence. Without him, there will no longer be a reason to hide.” Powerful in its subtleties, moving in its understatedness, the novel expresses the painful realities of a family and the quiet desperations that threaten to break it.

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César Aira
translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions ($12.95)

by Douglas Messerli

An insignificant Panamanian government employee named Varamo is paid his monthly salary, one day in 1923, in counterfeit money—money he recognizes as being false the moment it is placed into his hands. This law-abiding and fearful citizen of Colón, accordingly, is faced with an intense crisis for the first time in his life. Trying to spend the money will result in imprisonment, but how can he care for his ailing, slightly mad, Chinese mother, let alone himself, with no money?

In Varamo, his latest book to be translated into English and perhaps his most hilarious work to date, César Aira takes us through this first day and night of Varamo’s horrifying situation, wherein he is accosted by a local madman and a shady underground figure, witnesses the country’s Minister of the Interior suffer a car crash, and sits down to dine on a fish he was planning to embalm, already painted with chemicals, that his mother had cooked up for lack of better ingredients. He is also confronted with what he refers to as “the voices,” which speak meaningless sentences to him on a daily basis.

These voices slowly become untangled as the dizzyingly confused Varamo gets tangled up in a plot of codes and smuggling. Eventually, he runs into publishers at the local bar, men who are interested in having him write a book about his embalming experiences, promising him an advance precisely the amount of his counterfeited salary. Having never written a word before in his life, Varamo is skeptical, but has little choice: it is a perfect solution to his dilemma. So, after a mind-liberating walk through late-night Colón,

He sat down, and he wrote the poem. It is true that the verb "to write" covers a wide range of practices. In this case the author simply copied out all the papers he had put in his pocket since leaving the Ministry that afternoon. He did this in a cumulative fashion, without punctuation or divisions, without rearrangement, in lines of irregular length (the idea of prose, a late refinement in old civilizations, was utterly foreign to him). The order was determined by chance. The code book provided a basic structure, and he alternated the keys with literal transcriptions of the other notes. He had the advantage of having received contradictory instructions, which he followed with providential diligence of a beginner: Caricias had told him to change the keys to make them unrecognizable, and the publishers had advised him to leave the raw materials as they were.

Aira tells us at the beginning of the book that the result of this undertaking, which Varamo titles The Song of the Virgin Child, became the “celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry,” a work “drilled into the minds of schoolchildren or regularly chosen for recitation in poetry competitions.” On top of his hilarious spoof of how great experimental work is created, the author also plays with notions of genre, arguing that his own narrative, since it is “true,” is not a fiction but a use of the third person to tell the “truth,” as a journalist might.

Of course, Aira’s work is not at all truthful, but an absurd series of “postmodern” lies pretending to represent reality. The joy of Varamo lies in the fact that as the fictional poet’s world collapses about him, forcing him to build up a new reality, the reader gets to tag along, to play with the character and author in the creation of a new universe made up of the accidental and coincidental elements of an imagined life. And isn’t that what the creative act is really all about?

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Peter Markus
Dzanc Books ($16)

by Nick Ripatrazone

Recursivity in prose was a favorite trick of American postmodernists, with Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William Gass all spinning particular variations. While interviewing Gass in 1998 for Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt claimed Gass’s proclivities toward heightened and mannered language were ultimately grounded by a focus on place: the Midwest. We Make Mud, the newest collection of fiction from Peter Markus, is a descendent of Gass’s oeuvre, particularly On Being Blue, but results in a unique book focused on a paradoxically clear setting.

We Make Mud consists of brothers fishing, a father working, a mother resting, men crossing rivers: curiously vague characters performing even more curious actions. Those actions sometimes become violent, as the unnamed brothers drive nails into each other’s hands. We Make Mud does not exist in a realistic world, though: Markus deconstructs, and then methodically reconstructs, the reader’s comprehension of setting and character through his recursive language. Gass and his contemporaries might have had more of a cultural goal, whereas Markus endeavors to make us believe through disbelief.

His accomplishment of this feat is a true reward for the reader—at least the reader willing to remain in his exaggerated, elongated prose-poetic moments. The book arrives in blocks of texts without indentation and paragraph, and sentences such as this are common: “Maybe we do what our mother says for us brothers not to do—this no, this don’t, this mud—because we like it when our mother and our father say to us these words too: words that make the sound that a hammer sometimes makes when it hammers rusted nails into wood.”

The only section not containing blocked paragraphs is titled “Good, Mother.“ “Our father is not with us” is one of many clever plays with prayer and Biblical language in the book, but the real reason Markus uses this language is to focus our attention on the mother. The characters first act with care, holding her hand to the back of the house, where “we lay our mother down into this bed.” The care does not last, as the brothers build a resentment for the mother: it was she who “made us brothers wash the mud from our hands,” who said “that she wanted to go somewhere, anywhere . . . west of here.” Her punishment is implied in the final lines of the section, when the brothers “raise back the hammer” while they “line up these rusted nails.” It’s a jarring section, but it shows Markus’s control over the narrative as a whole.

Markus’s lexicon hinges on the juxtaposition of concrete words (fish, tree, mud) with more abstract titles (mother, father, brothers). The result is fascinating: supposedly concrete objects become malleable upon closer inspection, and the reader discovers that letters fall away upon repetition. This isn’t a literary parlor trick: the experimentation affects the content, creating a dizzying world where violence begets rebirth. We Make Mud is not for everyone—some readers will conclude that this massage of language stings the muscles, and the prior publication of many of the smaller chapters causes them to have the feel of standalones—but for those who love the possibilities of fictive language, the whole of We Make Mud is a treat.

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Joseph Salvatore
BOA Editions ($14)

by Weston Cutter

The first hint of magic in Joseph Salvatore’s To Assume a Pleasing Shape comes in the first story, though you have to read it again after finishing the collection to recognize it. “Parts” is a whisp, a narrator recalling what his father used to tell him about how to live (light meals, some coffee, “then even later, if you want, a bit of alcohol, sure—some beer, some wine, what have you, something to help you relax”). As the tale twists, “Parts” becomes about how life is more than simply a matter of keeping up “spirit and spine,” how life is about living within the knowledge of our own end, and trying to love and share ourselves despite the casual doom of the day-to-day. “Parts” sets an interesting template for the book; in each of the eleven stories here, Salvatore offers narratives that read and feel ultimately twinned. These are fictions of diametricism.

Take “Reduction,” a seven-part story as expansive as “Parts” is brief, in which an academic with massive breasts considers breast reduction surgery and her lover works through his complicated feelings about this (he loves her large breasts but doesn’t want to be just one more guy who loves large breasts). Take “Unheimliche,” which begins “But it’s not exactly like that either—at least not entirely—not exactly like what you said I just said.” Take, later in the collection, the almost colossally sad “Late Thaw,” in which a relationship’s start and end swirl together through a grieving man’s thoughts. Along with this emphasis on threading binaries together, in most of the stories the reader must try to catch up with a narrative that began before we arrived, and the collection is magnetic and propulsive because of this.

Two attributes are crucial to know before sitting down with To Assume a Pleasing Shape. First, this book contains extremely long sentences. “Late Thaw,” for instance, has maybe ten sentences in its five pages, and no paragraph breaks. Fortunately, Salvatore’s technical wizardry serves the narratives he presents—when you arrive at the conclusion of “Unheimliche,” you realize the lengthy sentences enhance the feeling of homelessness and confusion the story attempts to articulate. The other attribute: these stories are almost entirely free of plotted drama—they swirl and seethe and wrap about themselves in the telling, offering their own strange logic. BOA Editions certainly couldn’t have called To Assume a Pleasing Shape a collection of spells—where would such a thing be shelved?—yet that, ultimately, is what the reader is offered in Joseph Salvatore’s debut.

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Kate Bernheimer
FC2 ($14.95)

by Caroline Wilkinson

Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold—the last novel in her trilogy about three sisters—makes for an unusually happy ending. Lucy, the most cheerful of the Golds, steps forward to recount her life and untimely death. Her novel, like the others in the trilogy, draws upon traditions of the fairy tale. “Dearest robins, my precious friends!” Lucy exclaims while recalling a time she lived in the woods. “Did you ever love something so much you just wanted to eat it?” Her joy is so strong that it shatters and erases. In the breaks and blanks it leaves behind comes a sense of Lucy’s isolation.

Silence also slips through the cracks of this innovative, haunting novel. Like the other Complete Tales—the first one is about the saddest sister, Ketzia, the second about the meanest, Merry—short chapters form a fragmented yet cohesive narrative. At the center of this novel lies a mystery about what Lucy cannot say. Unlike her sisters whose turbulent emotions lead downward into profound conflict, Lucy doesn’t notice deeper aspects of existence, a fact she freely admits. While working as an animation artist for the movies, she is “considered airy fairy.” “I was . . . thought to live on the shiny surface of things. This is not an incorrect judgment of me.”

The surface of Lucy Gold sparkles with exclamation points. “Oh, our dear and resourceful Lucy!” cries the narrator in one of the many chapters rendered in the third person. Next to such bright lines, Bernheimer sets bold statements about loss. “Once upon a time,” says Lucy only a page after her resourcefulness is lauded, “a dark force took my spirit away and replaced it with nothing.” This “dark force” is about as well-defined as evil gets for Lucy. Her optimism is so extreme that she struggles to see any event that resists happy interpretation.

One such event is her own death. By page ten, we find out she is no longer alive. Just how she died, though, is not entirely clear to the reader or, it seems, to Lucy herself. She takes confused turns in her narration when confronting the end of her life. Cause and effect get switched, for instance, when she describes how her death followed a visit to her forest home from Ketzia. “After that, my job did not provide me with much satisfaction,” she says. “And so? I died, and then I quit.”

What exactly happened with Ketzia to provoke such despondency? This question has no answer within the novel, although the other books in the trilogy suggest possibilities. The completeness of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold as a novel on its own hinges on an acceptance of ambiguities and excised statements. Lucy’s account of Ketzia’s visit, for example, gives rise to a long fill-in-the-blank. “I’m terribly sorry,” Lucy remarks to the reader, “but I can’t tell you what she said. You’ll just have to imagine it here:_____________________________.”

Such evasions would be coy if Bernheimer didn’t so diligently show the consequences of Lucy’s actions. The ethereal, confused woman speaking about her life and death always sounds exactly like who she is: someone who has avoided brutal truths for years. Part of what makes this novel such an unusually beautiful gem is how Bernheimer exposes the ugly facets of relentless good cheer. Lucy’s optimism is frequently inappropriate. Furthermore, her habit of focusing on the “shiny surface of things” can be self-serving, especially at work. As she explains: “in the larger and more competitive world, my superficial appearance did serve me well.”

While mesmerizing on its own, Lucy Gold gains potency when viewed within the context of the trilogy as a whole. Lucy’s positive attitude looks like a practical necessity in light of her sisters’ fates. In The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold, the heroine’s sadness ultimately drives her to take “pink pills,” which she describes as “the size of hummingbird eggs,” to sleep. Merry is similarly ravaged by inner turbulence. “I’ve wasted so much of my life,” she says while recounting how she wandered through town in search of vodka with a stranger. “I hate myself.” The stranger beats her while ranting about how the olives that Merry wants will turn their vodka “tart.” Next to such dangerous tales of rage and despair, Lucy’s optimism seems like an attempt at basic survival.

While her cheerfulness sets her apart, Lucy’s novel squarely belongs with those of her sisters. The affinity has much to do with Bernheimer’s unique aesthetic. In all three Gold novels, the simple language and odd logic of the fairy tale come together with the occasional drawing or amateur snapshot. Also included are photos of common domestic objects, such as crafts and dolls. While these visual and verbal elements emphasize the familiar—the once-upon-a-times are as well-worn as the dolls with their blink-less gazes—their juxtapositions can startle. Oftentimes they rest on associations that are disturbingly close yet off-kilter. A photo of two crocheted acorns, for instance, comes at the end of a chapter about Lucy quitting her job with the film studio’s “Verisimilitude” department and moving into the woods with “the acorns and lichen.” The crocheted nuts have sewn-on smiles as seemingly permanent as Lucy’s.

Some of the juxtapositions can evoke raw emotion, but the surface of the prose always stays polished. Bernheimer is a wonderful stylist of deceptive skill. The power of her writing comes not from pyrotechnics but from polished lines that gently wake the reader to the unexpected. In Ketzia’s Complete Tales, one chapter begins in a simple, light style that echoes the language of a fairy tale. Soon, though, the narrative turns purely surreal. Four “depressed girls” appear as parts of a fragmented Ketzia:

The bespectacled one led us all on. Squinting ahead, she saw what she saw and stopped in her tracks. She couldn’t believe her lazy eyes: a neon-lit bar, so crowded it was deserted. She went up to the bartender and, lifting her patch, said, “Please, four one-dollar beers.” He answered, “It’s three dollars a margarita,” and gave them martinis with twists.

The girls reflect the whole Ketzia, who, at this point in the novel, is at the drunken end of a bad marriage. She and her husband drink “all the time, at all hours.” The reader can see nothing but divorce ahead, but Bernheimer startles at the chapter’s end with a photo that evokes beginnings. The photo is of a little girl dressed as a bride, her face thickly made-up. It’s hard not to assume that the picture is of Ketzia, even though the child is not identified. The photo makes Ketzia’s plight as a wife look generic and unavoidable. She seems to have practiced her part as the sad bride since childhood.

Some of the associations that Bernheimer makes in the trilogy—the childhood causes linked to adult effects—are both hideously bold and slightly vague, like a girl’s made-up face gleaned through a veil. Details from youth return in adult tales while moving in between the three books. A toy monkey that appears in Lucy Gold, for instance, also shows up in Ketzia’s novel obscurely. In Lucy’s Tales, the stuffed monkey is “under the bed” in a “worn cardboard shoebox.” The toy, which all three sisters play with as girls, comes to life in Ketzia’s novel when her mother calls her a “[g]ood little one-year-old monkey” while spinning her “around pretty hard.” Once married, Ketzia learns to “dance like a monkey, to dance like [she is] on a table but a monkey, not a girl.” Her husband, who wants her “to be more wild,” enjoys the dance. Ketzia’s effort, though, seems more domestic than wild when one thinks of the toy monkey that winds up in a box beneath a bed.

The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold with its complex connections supplies the right ending for this fascinating trilogy. Sometimes Lucy’s death seems more like a generative metaphor than a fatal conclusion. It inspires Lucy to keep turning back, to look at her lost life once more. It is possible that her death is purely symbolic and not literal. For those who have read the other Gold novels, this possibility may hold particular sway. Lucy’s Complete Tales is less gritty than those of her sisters, giving it the softer feeling of fantasy. This softness is undercut by a deep chill. The fantasy here has its roots in the cold dirt of Lucy’s psychological need and not in the clean conventions of genre.

For those who have not read the other Gold books, it makes sense to begin with this one. Its happily-ever-after is haunting both in its happiness and in what comes after its last page. The book inspires one to turn back, like Lucy, and see what came before.

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Elena Chizhova
translated by Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas
Glagoslav Publications ($22.50)

by Steve Street

Russians have a reputation for being at once soulful and tough. Is this because of the adversities their country has put them through, from severe cold to famine and brutal wars? Or is it because of the value their culture has historically placed on the pursuit of truth, as opposed to our own emphasis on the pursuit of happiness? Elena Chizhova wonders too, in this 2009 Russian Booker Prize-winner recently translated into English. By way of answer she evokes Soviet, World War II, and revolutionary times as well as the Tsarist/serf era, in an overlapping narrative about three generations of women living in a communal apartment while the USSR was putting down the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

At the forefront of the novel are the women’s alternating voices, spoken and interior; most of their concerns (as well as the narrative’s hooks) have to do with matters of Soviet life that range from the mundane to the urgent—applying for new living quarters or a TV, currying favor with bureaucrats, protecting one’s loved ones and oneself from the suspicions and interference of factory supervisors, neighbors, and the “municipal and communal services office.” The book’s title, though it may have another appeal in our own particular cultural moment, is (unlike much of the lyrical prose in the book) strictly literal: generations of Russian woman lived without men lost in wars, from the revolution and civil war through World War II, which figures particularly prominently in the memories of the three Grandmothers, unrelated woman who share ingrained survival instincts. Their religious faith also intertwines, renewed and strengthened as it’s been by having been outlawed, to help them keep watch over the single mother Antonina, also unrelated to any of them, and her worrisomely unspeaking daughter, the observant and artistic Sofia. As Grandma Glikeria says in a human, non-political take on a fundamental tenant of Communism, “People aren’t related by blood only.”

Actually, “in the daytime we called her lovingly—Sofyushka. Among ourselves—Sofia”: the ever-changing names and voices contribute to the evocation of a shimmering, tricky-to-grasp reality, in spite of its apparent harshness. From the absent, maimed, or drunken men at the edges of the story to the red-hot nails put in flour to keep it from going bad, the communal apartment-dwellers’ habit of turning on faucets to prevent eavesdropping, and the frequent discussions of what “they” require people to do—no antecedent needed—Chizhova paints Soviet Russia with a stiff-bristled but oddly softening brush, even in the feared character Zoya Ivanovna, Antonina’s factory supervisor, whose jurisdiction extends to other parts of workers’ lives.

The doubtful but tantalizing Soviet vision—of a paradise of washing machines and no need for money that will be achieved in twenty years, perhaps—intersects with Sofia’s delight in fairy tales, a performance of Swan Lake that her French-speaking grandmother Glikeria takes her to at an unnamed but elegant St. Petersburg theatre (the Mariinsky, maybe), a performance that’s also broadcast for watching on the newly distributed (after qualifying and waiting) TVs. Television provides a window to the real Russia’s past, too: in vintage footage Grandma Ariadna hopes for a glimpse of her lost loved ones. For Grandma Yevdokia and other faithful, the awaited paradise is of repeated references to “the other world.” For Grandma Yevdokia and other faithful, repeated references to “the other world” hint at a paradise worth waiting for.

For Antonina, after a diagnosis for unexplained bleeding, paradise is of less concern than providing for her daughter’s future by an arrangement with elements of the romantic, the mercenary, and the humane in proportions open to debate by all the other characters. Like the corpses of serfs on which Peter the Great built St. Petersburg, here’s the flip side of paradise, fairy tales, and artistic and architectural elegance: disease, along with hunger and fear and death and anti-Semitism and malicious gossip, all part of the truth of the Russian world, and Chizhova doesn’t flinch away from any of it. In Solzhenitsyn, cancer was perhaps a metaphor for the Soviet state, but Chizhova’s characters discuss it head-on: as mysterious as it is deadly, as apparently vulnerable to individual character and behavior as individuals can be to it. “‘In the old days,’—Glikeria recalls, —in the country, this cancer didn’t exist.“ And Grandma Yevdokia asks, “What sort of disease is this, if everything depends on the person?” Like the dramatic plot turn in this ethereal yet gritty story of yearning and survival and the struggle not just to cope with but to understand the forces that determine one’s life in a particular time and place, it’s a hard but compelling moment.

Overall, the particular time and place Chizova treats here propel the novel forward; any reader with an interest in things Russian—from the above-mentioned glimpses to the German blockade of Leningrad to the way Russians see America, and which nation really saved Europe in WWII—will find as much here to learn as to recognize. That the paradise didn’t in fact come to fruition in 1976—or ’86 either or, more arguably, with the ’91 break-up or afterwards—provides a poignant unspoken backdrop to the hopes, dreams, sufferings, and small triumphs of these characters, as if they haven’t been written for us poignantly enough already.

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Francis Spufford
Graywolf Press ($16)

by Justin Wadland

The difference between utopia and dystopia is awfully—some might say, fatally—thin. Often the difference is only a matter of perspective. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty contains many instances of double vision that capture both the aspirations and horrors of the Soviet Union. Take for example this memorable moment when one of the characters, a singer named Sasha Galich, gazes upon a piece of propaganda: “At the next corner, a giant banner rippled and flapped against the end wall of a block, with the honest face of Yuri Gagarin on it, six storeys high, and underneath the words he was supposed to have said, back in April, when they lit the rocket beneath him: LET’S GO. Upward with Yuri! Up to the stars; up Mr K.’s ladder to the heavens, whose foot stood in a mulch of blood and bone.”

“Mr K.” is Nikita Khrushchev, and Spufford’s book depicts that time in the ’50s and ’60s when the Soviet premier hoped to launch the USSR out of Stalin’s mulch of blood and bone and into an era of unprecedented prosperity. Red Plenty conjures the idea at the heart of this fever dream: the planned economy, which through the application of reason and technology would usher in the Communist version of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. “Because the whole system of production and distribution in the USSR was owned by the state, because all Russia was (in Lenin’s words) ‘one office, one factory,’ it could be directed, as capitalism could not, to the fastest, most lavish fulfillment of human needs. Therefore it would easily out-produce the wasteful chaos of the marketplace. Planning would be the USSR’s own self-turning millstone, its own self-victualling tablecloth.” This idea runs like a skewer through the episodic vignettes that follow, piercing and flavoring scenes culled from the ordinary lives of Soviet leaders, economists, mathematicians, computer scientists, young Komsomol members, black market fixers, and other folk in various strata of Soviet society who lived through period.

Between these meaty sections are generous helpings of commentary that introduce each of the six parts. In these, Spufford explains historical context and borrows the tone of a snarky scholar: “Whisper it quietly, but the capital productivity of the USSR was a disgrace. The Soviet Union already got less return for its investments, in terms of extra output, than its capitalist rivals . . . In effect, they were spraying the Soviet industry with the money that they had so painfully extracted from the populace, and wasting more than a third of it in the process.” One of these sections provides the very first sentences of Red Plenty and carves out the strange literary space it operates in: “This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it not history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story.” Surely it will end up shelved with fiction, but what kind of historical novel has over fifty pages of endnotes? These notes are not ironic, tongue-in-cheek mimicry of scholarly documentation, but genuine references to a welter of source material. In them, Spufford cops to invention and confabulation. “So once again here, I have cheated for the sake of heightened drama,” Spufford admits in a typical note. Residing in a liminal zone between fiction and nonfiction, Red Plenty resembles the kind of book David Shields admires in Reality Hunger: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”

Perhaps it’s best to stick to what Spufford himself calls this story: a fairy tale. And this fairy tale has hidden morals. Chief among them is that Soviet abundance was doomed from the start, weakened by a failure to acknowledge the limitations of human reason but ultimately poisoned by its reliance on tyranny. American fears of Communist domination appear outsized, outlandish even, in light such fatal flaws. From this view, capitalism didn’t so much win the Cold War as much as the Soviet system failed to meet the basic needs of its citizens. Lest we in America feel smug, we should remember that the United States was founded upon utopian ideals that frequently get translated into visions of free market plenty unhindered by any social, environmental, or fiscal limits. The fundamental problem of a tragic figure is that he cannot see his own fatal flaw, and Red Plenty demonstrates how such a condition can threaten an entire society, from its best minds on down.

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Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Sinan Antoon
Archipelago Books ($16)
by Brooke Horvath

Sinan Antoon, writing in The Nation upon the occasion of Mahmoud Darwish’s death in 2008, called him “one of the last great world poets.” Darwish published more than fifty books, his work finding in translation readers around the world; his public appearances attracted audiences in the thousands, and his poetry was sufficiently visible to be angrily debated by the Israeli government. When not living in exile, Darwish endured house arrest and imprisonment five times for his political activism and public readings (with the latter, even when he might have wished otherwise, invariably seen as an instance of the former). Through it all, Darwish accepted his role as the voice of Palestinian resistance while never allowing his poetry to succumb to the merely political or to the expectations of his audience. In the Presence of Absence was composed with the poet’s sense that it might well be his final work; as he writes here, “No poetry can defeat death when they meet, but it postpones it.” A spiritual autobiography that looks like prose but feels like poetry, that moves from death to birth, from his own grave to his father’s, from anecdote to meditation, In the Presence of Absence is, in the words of the newspaper Egypt Independent, “a farewell . . . that doesn’t end.”

In his Preface to the book, Antoon calls Darwish’s last effort a “self-elegy” (a genre with a long tradition in classical Arabic poetry), though Darwish himself remarked to Mohammad Shaheen, the book’s first translator into English (Absent Presence, Hesperus Press 2010) that even he did “not know to which literary genre this book belongs. I admit it is a baffling text.” Such a text, caught between genres like its author between home and exile, absence and presence, frustrated dream and confounding reality, seems entirely appropriate to describe this baffled life. “I came, and did not arrive. I came, and did not return,” Darwish writes of finding himself back in Gaza after years abroad. It was a life riddled with longing, caught between the lost paradise of a mythologized past and a future haunted by last things. It was a life seen as a “journey without roads, maps, or addresses” that never took the poet from the existential situation in which he—perhaps only more obviously than most of us—forever found himself: “But as you look over your life now, like a mariner considering his own disappointment with the unfathomable secrets of the sea, you ask: Where is my port?” It was a life that found itself attracted to poetry and imagination because poetry “is an act of freedom” and imagination a refusal to submit to reality. It was a life for which paradox, antithesis, and antimetabole were the preferred rhetorical schemes: “For not all what was will be, and not all that will be was”; “I resemble you, yet I do not become you. I become you, yet I do not resemble you.”

In the Presence of Absence takes the poet from his childhood in western Galilee to his family’s flight to Lebanon during the Nakba of 1948, from their surreptitious return a year later to what had become Israel, resulting in their classification as “present absentees,” to Darwish’s subsequent years of exile and return. As autobiography continues—heart surgery and increasingly precarious health, imprisonment, a typical day’s routines, reunion with his mother—Darwish reflects upon love and lust, writing as escape and homecoming, memory and imagination, Israel’s enthrallment to its own myths and the beauty of the places he has called home, loneliness and longing, the scent of mango and ginger in Cairo and autumn in Paris. Throughout, Darwish seeks to close the rift between words and “what they represent” in “a struggle for what lies beyond the power of weapons: the power of words.”

“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” W.H. Auden wrote of William Butler Yeats. Darwish, too, was certainly hurt into poetry, atoning “for sins I had not committed” by striving to be a Trojan among poets, that is, one who tells the stories the victors don’t want told. Thus, Darwish speaks of the lives of the expatriated:

There is nothing we can do and there is no tomorrow, they said, when we are in this state, bound to firm fates, tied to abyss after abyss. We take water from the neighbors’ wells and borrow bread from the rock’s bounty. We live, if we are able to live, in an infant past, planted in fields that were ours for hundreds of years until a moment ago, before the dough rose and the coffeepots cooled. In one ill-fated hour, history entered like a bold thief through a door as the present flew out through a window. With a massacre or two, the country’s name, our country, became another. Reality became an idea and history became memory. The myth invades and the invasion attributes everything to the will of the Lord who promised and did not renege on his promise. They wrote their narrative: We have returned. They wrote our narrative: They have returned to the desert. They put us on trial: Why were you born here? We said: Why was Adam born in paradise?

In the occupied territories or in Tunis or Vienna, Darwish lived what the Israeli-Palestinian writer Emile Habibi described as an imprisoned life, whether one found oneself behind bars or on the street. Here, the personal is inescapably political, the two as difficult to disentangle as memory and imagination, poetry and prose, presence and absence. Thus, arriving in Ramallah across the Allenby Bridge, Darwish confronts a security checkpoint: “on this bridge no one is who he was just a moment before . . . There the soldier, be it male or female, will peel him unceremoniously. Because they possess the right to do with him as they wish: Take off your shoes! Take off your watch! Undo your belt!”

As Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued, occupation provokes resistance, and in resistance one may find both freedom and dignity. So it was with Darwish, that exile from paradise, who wrested from such an existence more than poetry; he also found wisdom and gratitude (I will not add “lasting fame” to the list, for “immortality is a winning lottery ticket whose owner died minutes before the result was announced”). In making present what is absent, Darwish became more than one of those victims he describes who “did not finish any of their tasks.” Life on the margin, he insists, lets one know where one stands: “The margin is a window looking out on the world. You are neither in it, nor outside it. The margin is a cell without walls. The margin is a personal camera that selects the images it wants from the scene, so that the king is not a king and David’s slingshot is nothing but Goliath’s weapon.” And as Darwish makes clear on every page of this book, amid a baffled lifetime’s marginalia can also be found the wherewithal to bless much of what has been—like sleep, “which gathers you from the ends of the earth and holds you tight as if you were your own mother,” or any tree whose green is an “expression of gratitude the earth sends in a soliloquy to its neighbor, the sky.” Many people safe in their homes have found less to be thankful for, and less to praise.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse Books ($14.99)

by Greg Baldino

Memory and history often lie about each other, and yet in autobiographical writing this murkiness often leads to greater truths than mere facts. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, a graphic novel written by literary scholar Mary M. Talbot and illustrated by acclaimed cartoonist Bryan Talbot, binds together history and memoir as Mary recounts her relationship with her late father and parallels it with the life of James Joyce's daughter Lucia.

Sparked by the adult Mary's discovery of her father's ID card, her train of thought traces back to her childhood in post-rationing England. Here in a household of half-a-dozen, there was no escape for Mary from her father, whose moods ran from whimsical and doting to raging or indifferent. Elsewhen and elsewhere, Lucia has different troubles of escape from her family, compounded by their dependence on her father's literary work. Both women find their upbringings shaped by their fathers and their father's relation to Joyce's work, but while Mary makes it out intact (she is the narrator, after all,) Lucia's life takes a more tragic turn.

In a graphic novel exploring memories of a woman's father and the parallels with literature, there's an obvious comparison to make with Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Both Bechdel and Talbot examine their fathers through their emotional extremities and their literary fixations. (Bechdel's father, a teacher of English literature, was engrossed with the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, while Mary's was a Joyce scholar) The differences between them are numerous, though, not least of which is that Fun Home is the work of a solo creator, while Dotter is a collaboration between not only a writer and an artist, but a husband and wife. (This results in a few amusing incongruities, such as when Mary remarks in a footnote that contrary to how Bryan has drawn her, “My mother wouldn't have been seen dead in a frilly apron.”)

Bryan Talbot, of course, is no stranger to experimenting with different forms in the comics medium, especially with his previous non-fiction work, the graphic novel Alice in Sunderland. For Mary, it's an entrance into a new form in which her voice as a writer finds a comfortable rhythm with her husband's artwork. The three different threads of Dotter are distinguished by changes in the coloring scheme and the drawing style, a strategy that achieves not only complexity but often a transcendent beauty. The Lucia sequences are rendered in black and white with a gray wash, in a style very similar to Bryan's more mainstream work—especially in the book's climax, as the discord in the Joyce family reaches its apex. Mary's own memories are rendered with a softer ink line and sepia tones accented with additional color used to highlight young Mary's attentions, as in one panel where she looks upon the tank of tropical fish kept in her father's study that become an array of jewels on the page. The modern sequences, consisting of only three and a half pages, are done in full color with a thin line reminiscent of Hergé, and are almost unnecessary as a framing device; the entwined narratives of Mary Talbot and Lucia Joyce are compelling enough on their own that these sequences could be dropped altogether, though not for any issue of quality.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is Mary Talbot's first foray into graphic novels, following several academic volumes on literature. Though her strengths as a writer are more than adequate, this book achieves its engaging complexity through the narrative tools and multi-layered structures possible with the comics page. It's a slim but ambitious volume that makes for a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of autobiographical comics.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012