Amir Or
translated by Seth Michelson
Sagging Meniscus ($22)

by Kenneth J. Pruitt

Reading poetry in translation always puts one in the position of wondering what one is missing. The nuances of cadence, the resonances of sound, and, most obviously, the subtleties of meaning all risk being sacrificed at the altar of wider readership beyond the poet’s native tongue. Wings, a bilingual edition of Israeli poet Amir Or’s thirteenth book of poems, demonstrates that this in-between-ness might be exactly what we need right now. The book is laid out with the English translations on the right acting as the mirror reflections of their Hebrew originals on the left, and since these two languages read in opposite directions, the reader gets a visual sense of the act of translation—quite a nifty trick.

Over two major parts of the book with several sections each, Or weaves themes of the multiplicity of the self, religion (although the author himself is a secular humanist), creation, nature, and the baselessness of time. At times, each section can feel like a methodically crafted poem cycle. At others, as with the first section, “Morning Poems,” the sections seem to act as windows onto the poet’s writing process, where each poem feels like a draft of another.

Another of the more notable sections of the book is “The Journey (A Diary).” Or carries the reader through not only different landscapes, but also the days of the week, ending the section with the title poem, “Wings,” here in its entirety:

Spread your wings, dear one, and look
around you at this beloved world—
don’t let your spirit fail.
Even in the depths of darkness
remember: you’re flying to the light.

After several more sections spent ruminating on spirituality, Or really hits his stride with “Poems of Reckoning,” the last section. Deftly using images and themes introduced throughout the book, the poetics here underscore polemics, as in “Tomorrow,” maybe the best poem in the collection: “For what we will be is all that we bit into— / the flesh of the poor, immigrants, Arabs, the old; / and we have no I except the ones we are— / where we looked for mercy, we found none.” The self as multiplicity, the failure of religion, the collision of past, present, and future: philosophical ideas are stitched together here to bolster an overtly political poem.

This is how poetry is useful. This is how poetry does something. With this newly translated edition of Wings, Amir Or is finally able to open a dialogue with readers in the United States. May we respond to the invitation.

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Henri Michaux
Translated by Richard Sieburth
New York Review Books ($16)

by M. Kasper

Like his comic book compatriot Tintin, the writer and visual artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) grew up in Belgium, traveled the world, and finally settled in France. In 1930, when he’d already published an experimental memoir and an unconventional account of a trip to Ecuador, Michaux’s gallimaufry of poems, prose poetry, and drama entitled A Certain Plume came out from the Parisian avant-garde publisher Éditions de Carrefour and ensured his reputation. Plume is the collection’s Chaplinesque main character, a self-portrait of the author perhaps, though, as Michaux says in a “Postface:”  “There is no single self. There are not ten selves. There is no self.”

In the years that followed the publication of A Certain Plume, Michaux slowly but successfully pursued careers in both writing and painting, often melding the two. His visual art was Klee-like, proto-Lettrist. Much of his writing took the form of short prose, and trips—touristic, spiritual, and drug-induced—were a favored theme. His work is sometimes associated with the Surrealists (about whom he said in a March 1961 ArtNews interview with John Ashbery, “One values [them] less for what they wrote than for the permission they gave everybody to write whatever comes into their heads”), though he remained aloof from literary groups.

Michaux has been widely read and influential in American literary circles since 1951, when New Directions published Selected Writings: The Space Within, a compilation (including ten pieces from Plume) translated by Richard Ellmann. In the ’50s and ’60s, the Beats were also fascinated by Michaux’s psychedelic writing, translations of which were issued by City Lights, and New York School poets cherished his witty concision and visual sensibility; unaffiliated pioneers of latter-day American short prose like Marvin Cohen, Carol Bergé, and Russell Edson all acknowledged the impact, in particular, of the Plume stories. Since then, Michaux’s inclusion in major anthologies of French writing in English translation, as well as a couple of substantial selections from his prolific output, have made his offbeat, funny takes on everyday events and relationships—and what Ashbery called his “oozy metaphysical terrain”—familiar to many English-language readers.

Now, with Richard Sieburth’s excellent contemporary and colloquial translation of the entirety of the 1930 publication, with facing-page French, we finally have an opportunity to read all thirty-four texts of this 20th-century classic in their original order and setting—and indeed, to read quite a few that were previously untranslated. Part One is comprised of the anecdotes explicitly featuring Plume, many familiar from frequent translation (see below); Part Two is a playlet; Three and Four include mostly miscellaneous short prose; Five, the final part, is made up of half a dozen free-verse poems, the last of which poignantly portrays the author’s mother’s death; and then, for this book, there’s an appendix with several extra Plume stories, written later, and the extended and important “Postface” that Michaux added to the collection for its bestselling second edition in 1938. Thanks are due to the publisher and to translator Richard Sieburth for this well designed and thoughtfully edited version. A Certain Plume is the fourth full-length work by Michaux that Sieburth has rendered into English; his experience with the author and long academic and translating career has made his afterword particularly worth attending to. It eruditely situates the book in its literary surround, provides close readings of some pieces, and sketches the biographical backstory that accounts, in part, for the collection’s abundance of death and mayhem.

Over decades, some of our finest translators from French have had a go at Michaux, giving us a wonderful opportunity for comparison. Here, to conclude this review, are six examples of “Un homme paisable,” the first work in the Plume sequence, and one of the most often translated. Sieburth titles it and translates the celebrated first two paragraphs (of eight) as follows:

A Peaceable Man
Extending his hands from his bed, Plume was astonished not to feel the wall: “Well, he concluded, the ants must have eaten it away . . .” And he went back to sleep.
Shortly thereafter, his wife shook him awake: “Take a good look, lazybones! While you were so busy sleeping, someone went and stole our house!” And indeed, stretching out on every side there was nothing but solid sky. “So it goes,” he thought.

Ellmann’s 1951 translation:

A Tractable Man
Stretching his hands out beyond the bed, Plume was surprised at not meeting the wall. « Imagine that, » he thought, « the ants must have eaten it up . . . » and he went back to sleep.
A little later his wife grabbed hold of him and shook him: « Look, » she said, « you slug! While you were busy sleeping somebody has stolen our house. » It was true, an unbroken sky stretched on all sides above them. « Oh well! the thing is done » he thought.

From Mid-century French Poets (Grove, 1955), edited and translated by Wallace Fowlie:

A Peaceful Man
Stretching his hands out of the bed, Plume was amazed at not touching the wall. “Well,” he thought, “the ants must have eaten it . . .” and he went back to sleep.
Soon after, his wife took hold of him and shook him: “Good-for-nothing,” she said, “Look! while you were busy sleeping, they stole our house from us.” It was true. Wherever he looked, he saw the sky. “Bah! it’s done now,” he thought.

From Darkness Moves, An Henri Michaux Anthology (University of California, 1994), edited and translated by David Ball:

A Peaceful Man
Stretching his hands out from the bed, Plume was surprised not to encounter the wall. “Hmm,” he thought, “the ants must have eaten it . . .” and he went back to sleep.
A bit later his wife caught him by the arm and shook him: “Look,” she said, “you good-for-nothing! While you were busy sleeping, they stole our house from us.” And in fact, sky stretched out uninterrupted on every side. “Oh well, it’s over and done with,” he thought.

From Someone Wants to Steal My Name and Other Poems by Henri Michaux, edited by Nin Andrews (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2003), translated by Richard Howard:

A Manageable Man
Stretching his hands beyond the bed, Plume was surprised not to touch the wall. “Think of that!” he thought, “the ants have eaten I . . ..” and he went back to sleep.
Later his wife shook him awake: “Look, lazybones!” she said, “while you were busy sleeping, our house has been stolen.” In fact, an unbroken sky stretched in all directions. “Oh well,” Plume thought, “what’s done is done . . .”

From Storms Under the Skin, Selected Poems 1927-1954 by Henri Michaux, translated by Jane Draycott (Two Rivers Press, 2017):

A Peaceable Man
Stretching out his hands beyond the bed, Plume was surprised not to encounter the wall. “Goodness” he thought, “the ants must have been eating at it.” And he went back to sleep.
Not long after, his wife grabbed him and shook him, “Look at that, you useless lump!” While you were so busy sleeping, our whole house has been stolen.” And in truth, a perfect sky stretched out in every direction around them. “Ah well,” he thought, “what’s done is done.”

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Robert Jay Lifton
The New Press ($22.95)

by Robert Zaller

Robert Jay Lifton set out long ago to be our catastrophist: the chronicler of the grim age of the twentieth century that included the two most terrible wars in history, and, with the advent of the atomic bomb, of a climate of terror that promises worse wars to come, if not a final one; the nightmare of totalitarian regimes that threatened human personality itself; the rise of apocalyptic cults and global terrorism; and the rupture of generational continuity that gave final meaning to individual lives. Lifton is probably still best known for his Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, but he has studied Nazi doctors, Chinese brainwashing, and the consequences, dehumanizing to victims and perpetrators alike, of what he has called “the genocidal mentality.”

Lifton is now in his nineties, and the century whose horrors he set out to record has passed into a new and no less ominous one. “Nuclearism,” as he has called it, is still very much with us, as the recent brinksmanship between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump reminds us, but the cloud that hangs most threateningly over us now is that of climate change. We didn’t need to break the atom to produce this cloud, but merely to poison the planetary environment, an insidious and largely invisible process glibly identified with progress and civilization.

Much of this devastation was accomplished in the twentieth century, as the human population—world wars notwithstanding—quadrupled, not only ransacking the planet’s resources and threatening its biodiversity, but creating in hyper-urbanization huge engines of consumption and pollution. Now, looking back, Lifton confesses to having come late to the climate story, although in retrospect the markers for him, as for all of us, were clearly there. But the hubris that gave us the century’s other disasters is, he contends, very much of a piece with one that preoccupies us now, and the mentality that produced genocide and nuclearism has given us our current crisis as well.

As Lifton points out, the story of nuclear proliferation has several points of affinity with the seemingly more diffuse narrative of climate change. In both cases, a sense of fated disaster has fit, especially although not exclusively in the Western mind, with apocalyptic expectations foreshadowed in sacred texts: the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Noah’s flood in the Old Testament—both tales of climate catastrophe in substantial part—and the Second Coming in the Gospels, with its presumption of an end to the terrestrial sphere altogether. Both the threat of a nuclear winter conjured up in the 1980s and the scenario of a world unhinged by rising sea levels and wild swings of temperature and precipitation seem to mirror (or for certain groups, to fulfill) the biblical prophecies. But, just as these latter have been interpreted as part of an ultimately beneficent divine dispensation, so, too, have “nuclearism” and climate change been embraced as potential opportunities and even as agents of good. Some hailed nuclear weapons as guarantors of world peace, since they were plainly too terrible to use; similarly, others now see climate change as a challenge to technological innovation and resource management. In both cases, the solution for the monsters created by modern science is more science.

At one extreme, the global crises of the bomb and the greenhouse effect lead to what Lifton calls psychic numbing, in which perils are minimized by wishful thinking; thus, the duck and cover drills of the 1950s in the U.S.A., in which schoolchildren were taught to hide under desks as protection against nuclear fireblasts and contamination, or, in the case of the noted physicist Freeman Dyson (a fervent advocate, as Lifton notes, of nuclear disarmament) the idea that the carbonization of the atmosphere will on balance be “enormously beneficial.” Then, too, there are the proponents of what Lifton calls climate nuclearization, in which reliance on nuclear power will solve the climate crisis, a position championed by James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first brought the latter to public attention in 1988. To be sure, militarists and energy profiteers have cynically argued that ever-expanding nuclear arsenals and unchecked carbonization are good for us; but that otherwise serious and reputable people make similar claims should give us pause. Psychic numbing is a very ancient mechanism, even in the minds of highly intelligent people: if reality frightens or offends you, deny it.

Lifton’s book could easily fit into this literature as well, but, as he points out, concluding that nothing can be done about seemingly overwhelming or intractable problems is itself a form of denial. The climate “swerve” of his title refers to is the emerging awareness over the past thirty years of the great ecological crisis we face, emblematized in the Paris Climate Accords. Nuclear weapons, to be sure, are still with us, but not, thanks to disarmament activists, the fatalism that once surrounded their inevitable use. It is easy to succumb to despair, but, Lifton says, the two-footed mammal that calls itself human has overcome innumerable obstacles in its career thus far, and the skills of awareness and adaptability that have created our current predicaments may yet with wisdom solve or at least mitigate them: “Of course it is very late in the game,” he concedes, “but at the same time far from too late.”

The Climate Swerve is, frankly, not a book that encourages hope. But if its nonagenarian author does not reject it, perhaps the rest of us can hang on to some too.

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Roberto Calasso
translated by Richard Dixon
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux ($20)

by M. Lock Swingen

In conferences and symposiums, Roberto Calasso, one of the preeminent men of letters living and working in Italy today, can sometimes be heard to describe the tradition of literature as a kind of living creature, a veritable “serpent of books” winding its way through the centuries and epochs, wholly engulfing cultural periods, places, personalities, criticism, philosophy, and myth. The interlinking vertebrae are forever multiplying and rearranging as the serpent devours its way through time and space, but in Roberto Calasso’s magnum opus, a series of interconnected volumes that he began with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, the Italian man of letters aims to dissect and study the anatomy of this living creature during some of its most crucial perambulations through our collective history. Although the encyclopedic series of volumes in Calasso’s oeuvre take on wildly different subject matter—Greek mythology, classical Indian philosophy, and pagan imagery, to name a few—they uniformly share a method and style that is the trademark of Calasso’s art form: Each volume is made up of a densely layered pastiche of citations and quotations, genealogical studies of philosophical ideas and concepts, epigrams and aphorisms, and penetrating character profiles of the writers and thinkers whose work defines a time period. Richard Dixon’s recent translation of The Ruin of Kasch reintroduces the remarkably erudite and genre-defying universe of Roberto Calasso to a younger generation of English readers who are perhaps unfamiliar with his work.

The heterogeneous and ever-revolving cast of thinkers, artists, and hangers-on who populate the brimming pages of The Ruin of Kasch circle around the three foremost subjects of the book: ritual and ancient sacrifice, revolution, and the origins of modernity. Significantly, Calasso has chosen the historical figure of Talleyrand, the crafty French statesman and diplomat who managed to hold onto his head during the French Revolution, as guide and interpreter designated to lead the reader through the thick and gnarly pages of Calasso’s labyrinthine tome. Possibly, Talleyrand also provides the key that unlocks the interrelatedness of the daunting subject matter, if they are indeed interrelated, which proves a constant and nagging question that confronts the reader at almost every turn of page. Prepare for detours and forays that follow no discernible trail. Just shy of 400 pages, Calasso manages to quote everyone and everything from Baudelaire, Goethe, the Upanishads, “Das Kapital,” the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius (from whose collation of African myths the title of the book is drawn), and several hundred other works in several languages. If books had a maximum capacity of weight and persons like elevators do, The Ruin of Kasch is definitely breaking code. Calasso’s principle model, the German critic and literary theorist Walter Benjamin, once aspired to write a book that consisted of nothing but quotations. Calasso has very nearly achieved just that.

The book opens during the French Revolution, that classic episode of modern history, where the collapse of the ancien régime presented the downtrodden and oppressed an unprecedented opportunity to take control of their circumstances and refashion them according to a conscious plan or set of principles. Nobody before in history had ever had such an extraordinary chance. The absolute monarchy was overthrown. The nobility were overthrown. The Catholic Church was shuttered up. In the middle of all of it we find Talleyrand. Calasso writes: “Talleyrand’s role above all was that of master of ceremonies—but this was an age where ceremonies had lost their meaning, an age that claimed it could do without them, while it stumbled at every step. At that point Talleyrand offered his arm, impassively—and helped find a way out of the embarrassment. But what ought to have caused alarm was his distant gaze in proffering help.” Calasso’s uncanny ability to uncover the true character and significance of historical figures derives from the vast source material that he unearths and wields with the ease of a scholar, but his aims are never academic despite all his learning: Calasso instead wants to reveal character like a novelist. For example, while comparing and contrasting the two historical figures of Talleyrand and Lafayette, which Calasso sets up as a kind of dramatic foil in one passage, he writes:

Lafayette is the true opposite of Talleyrand. They are born and die within a few years of each other, both have illustrious ancestries, both are involved in everything. Lafayette, convinced from the very start that he is moving with the times, is especially eager every now and then to strike historic poses, and in the meantime to survive. He has an unshakable capacity not to notice. Talleyrand also moves with the times, follows trends, changes his shirts and his allegiances. But this is not why he is not forgiven. On the contrary: it is felt that his amorality is consistent and faithful, that his ever-moving and restless waters conceal some solid, ancient rock that resists the ravages of time much better than the papier-mâché of Lafayette.

Of course, the transition phase from the ancien régime to the new order wasn’t a pretty one, to put it mildly. The euphoric liberation initially felt by the downtrodden and oppressed led eventually to what is infamously known and aptly named as the “Great Terror,” a time period characterized by the vacuum of power ushered in by the total collapse of the ancien régime and the subsequent frenzied power grab, where beady-eyed and murderous tyrants and opportunists competed ruthlessly for supremacy. Enter Robespierre, another heavy hitter during the French Revolution. The line between political opposition and treason blurred. Political crimes now became so widely defined that nobody felt safe. The former nobility and just as many revolutionaries were now being executed for their counter-revolutionary potential alone. Exit Robespierre. Many were shot or drowned, but most died under the instrument that would eventually dispatch the king: the guillotine. Introduced in April 1792 and designed as a humane means of execution by rational men who touted the progressive policies and ethos of the Enlightenment, the guillotine unleashed rivers of blood and claimed an unprecedented number of sacrificial victims unseen in that era. It is this necessity for government and order by bloodletting that leads us to the mythological tale at the heart of The Ruin of Kasch.

Calasso recounts the tale of a prosperous African kingdom that lends its name to the title of Calasso’s book—Kasch—where the king reigned supreme but where an order of priests would also consult the stars and according to the course of those stars calculate the hours and pronounce judgements and sometimes order the execution of the king and the installment of a new one. The king would also choose companions to die with him. In the tale of “The Ruin of Kasch” the king chose a famed storyteller named Far-li-mas to accompany him to his death. One day, the king invited Far-li-mas to the court to recount his stories and fables. Calasso writes: “Far-li-mas’s story was like hashish. When he had finished, all were swathed in a benign unconsciousness. King Akaf had forgotten his thoughts about death. None of those present had realized that Far-li-mas’s story had lasted from the evening to the morning.” It went on like this for some time, joyfully. But the priests also kept a fire upon which they would heap the keepers of the fire as sacrificial offerings to God. One day, the sister of King Akaf was appointed the keeper of the fire. Sali-fu-Hamr was very afraid and did not want to die. Sali also loved Far-li-mas and did not want him to die. Sali also loved her brother the king and did not want him to die. But the calculation of the course of the stars according to the priests ordained it. In the tale of “The Ruin of Kasch” Sali confronts the order of the priests. She says:

“Great are the works of God. But the greatest of them is not his writing in the sky. The greatest of them is life on earth. I came to realize it last night.” The priest said: “What do you mean?” Sali said: “God has given Far-li-mas the gift of telling stories, as he had never done before. This is greater than the writing in the sky.” The chief priest said: “You are wrong.” . . . Sali said: “Then show me I’m wrong, that the writing in the sky is more powerful and greater than life on earth.”

The conflict between the priests and Sali is interesting here. For a modern reader, it isn’t very difficult to understand the motivation of Sali: Who the hell wants to be sacrificed? Clearly, there is a sharp line drawn between the protagonist and the bad guys here. But is it really so? We need to consider the time period. After all, it’s not like our ancestors didn’t know what they were doing. In early settled agricultural societies like the land of Kasch there permeated in the people an extreme sense of dread and fear over man’s tenuous place in the natural order. In contrast to the lifestyle of bygone nomadic hunter gatherers, the people who settled down to build and to plant began to experience the natural world as an endless source of chaos and terror. Gone were the days of following the rhythmic provisions of nature, like the hunter gatherers did, where there was always enough food over there if there wasn’t enough food over here. To say the least, that level of trust in nature’s merciful bounty was completely absent in the early settled agricultural societies, where a living had to be tortured and coaxed out of a specific piece of real estate. Imagine trying to predict the time for planting, for harvesting, for when the frost will set in or when the rains will come or when the river is going to flood the plain. Anxiety becomes a way of life. Planting a month late one year could lead to the collapse of an entire civilization.

One of the most striking similarities among early settled agricultural societies in this regard is the emergence of the awareness of the heavenly bodies and the course of the stars and the establishment of a priesthood dedicated to tracking those movements of the night sky. This desire to interpret and even potentially control the environment is almost entirely absent from hunter gatherers, who of course understood the environment astoundingly well, but they did not seek to control it. At first, the priesthood still understood the natural forces in terms of an omnipotent will that drove events and brought joy or catastrophe. Basically, they took everything personally. But the priesthood eventually made a tremendous discovery. They discovered that you could bargain with the future. If you let go of something valuable or even something that you hold most dear that sacrifice would grant you a moral claim that you could redeem in the future. In other words, the discovery of sacrifice is the concession that something valuable has to be given up in order for something even better to happen later on. One must embrace sacrifice and death voluntarily in order to move forward and progress. Hence all that burnt lamb smoke and all those firstborns tied to posts.

But Sali thinks the land of Kasch has progressed beyond the need for all the bloodletting and all the sacrifices. And she does have a point here. One of the ways to mark and identify the development of early settled agricultural societies is by tracking the maturation and increasing level of mastery displayed in the calculations of the heavenly bodies and the course of the stars in the night sky. The priesthood began to arrive at the understanding that there existed some kind of impersonal, mechanical order to the universe that ran like clockwork. They began to map out their earthly territory in less personal terms. If the priesthood had developed progressive means that allow society to take possession of the environment, why sacrifice to God? In the land of Kasch the crops are always planted on time. When the priesthood arrives at the court to listen to the stories of Far-li-mas, Calasso writes:

As morning approached Far-li-mas raised his voice. . . . The more powerful his voice became, the more its sound echoed in the people. The hearts of the people rose against each other, as in battle. They raged against each other, like the clouds in the sky on a stormy night. Flashes of anger clashed with thunderbolts of fury. When the sun rose, Far-li-mas reached the end of his story. The confused minds of the people were overwhelmed with indescribable amazement. For when those still alive looked around them, their eyes fell on the priests. The priests were lying on the ground, dead.

From that day on no one else was killed or sacrificed in the land of Kasch. Calasso goes on to recount that King Akaf lived happily to the end of his days, when he died of old age. Far-li-mas succeeded him as king. Wise men came to seek the new king’s advice and counsel. All the princes from foreign lands sent Far-li-mas gifts. But the success and achievements of the land of Kasch sowed envy in the hearts of the neighboring lands and kingdoms. When Far-li-mas died the neighboring lands and kingdoms broke their treaties and began a war. The war marked the ruin of the land of Kasch.

Sacrifice, Calasso writes, “is the cause of ruin,” but also, “the absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin.” After recounting the mythological tale of “The Ruin of Kasch,” squirreled away somewhat inconspicuously in the middle of the book, Calasso then runs through an exhaustive and sometimes baffling gloss of the tale’s possible meanings but also the possible meanings of the nature of sacrifice itself. One of the theories of sacrifice that grips Calasso’s imagination is the theory of the scapegoat, formulated by the social scientist and philosopher René Girard. Girard theorized that when disagreement and discord threaten to tear apart the delicate social fabric of a community, one of the methods through which the people restore order and harmony is by designating an outside party or victim onto which everyone in the community can direct their rage and antipathy. Usually, a totalitarian ruler prescribes the outside party or victim whom also not-so-coincidently justifies the totalitarian ruler’s own rise to absolute power. It’s a sort of three step process. Citizen 1: “I’m going to kill you.” Citizen 2: “Please don’t kill me.” Citizen 1 and Citizen 2, intermediated by totalitarian ruler: “Well, let’s all kill them then.” The subsequent discharge of violent energy that had been heretofore bouncing around the community reaffirms a cathartic feeling of collective identity. It works like a charm almost every time. Calasso quotes Girard directly on the obvious drawback of this formula: “This is the terrible paradox of desires in men. They can never agree on the preservation of their object; but they can always agree on its destruction; they never reach agreement with each other except at the expense of a victim.”

This problem brings us to the last great subject of The Ruin of Kasch: Calasso’s very subtle polemic against modernity, which was ushered in by the turmoil and monumental bloodshed of the French Revolution, the harbinger of our modern political landscape. Essentially, Calasso’s argument is that the disorder of the contemporary world is a legacy of the collapse of earlier societies in which the ritual of sacrifice played a crucial role. Calasso writes: “History can be summed up as follows: for a long time men killed other beings, dedicating them to an invisible object; and then, from a certain point, they killed without dedicating this act to anyone . . . Then the simple act of killing remained.” What, then, was the real significance of all those rolling heads during the French Revolution? There were so many of them leveled at the scaffold of the guillotine. It is difficult sometimes not to wonder if the revolutionaries ever came to regret the brutal efficiency of that machine. Do all those tumbling heads embody something like the tremendous realization of the priesthood in “The Ruin of Kasch” that one must sacrifice the old ways of doing things in order to move forward and progress? Or do they perhaps represent the killing of the priests themselves? Or were they merely those poor sacrificial victims à la Girard that crudely held the community together in a time of crisis? It is a question that haunts the formidable mind of Calasso. Since 1789, in any case, few countries have failed to experience their own revolution, and in all of them there have been revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries looking back at what exactly happened in France in the hopes of finding inspiration, models, patterns, and warnings. In the thick and gnarly pages of The Ruin of Kasch Calasso contemplates the prophecy of the guillotine more seriously and more thoroughly than perhaps anyone else living today.

In the most revealing gloss of the mythological tale of “The Ruin of Kasch” Calasso writes succinctly: “This is a story about the passage from one world to another, from one order to another—and about the ruin of both. It is the story of the precariousness of order: of the old order and the new. The story of their perpetual ruin.” (139). Of course, he could just as well be talking about the French Revolution—or the inheritors of it, whom would be us—and that struggle since time immemorial between the values of tradition and the relentless forward march of progress. And yet in all that chaos and pandemonium of 1789 there was one man who rose above it all, almost effortlessly: Talleyrand. No matter how tangential or free-wheeling the pages of The Ruin of Kasch become, and they do become pretty damn oblique and sometimes even schizoid in their unyielding digressions, they always seem to curb back inevitably toward the historical figure of Talleyrand, the center of gravity in the expansive universe of Calasso’s mind-bending tome, where data and information and analysis is always whirring past the reader at the level of warp speed. In the end, why did Calasso choose Talleyrand to guide us Virgil-like through the overflowing pages of The Ruin of Kasch?

The answer, surprisingly enough, seems clear. Talleyrand was the only political figure who was able to leap frog from one regime to another and another during a time when most other political figures had their heads rolling on the scaffold whenever a regime change occurred. Widely detested for his cynicism and duplicity and extremely useful for the same reasons, Talleyrand held positions of power through the ancien régime, the French Revolution, the Directory (the constitutional republic until Napoleon seized power), Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration, and finally during the return of the citizen-king Louis-Philippe. “While every municipal partisan spirit was at last finding his metaphysics in the vision of the Party,” Calasso writes, “Talleyrand maintained the indifference of the sky and the water: mutable, elusive, unscathed among many faiths.” For Calasso, Talleyrand perhaps represents the essential problem posed in the dense pages of The Ruin of Kasch: How do we know who to sacrifice if the art of politics is now about surviving the grip of events? Clearly, it is precisely the evasive fluidity of Talleyrand’s politics that makes him the first true modern man of our time.

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Katie Williams
Riverhead Books ($25)

by Greg Chase

Set in the year 2035, Katie Williams’s Tell the Machine Goodnight envisions a dystopian future, though it’s one that largely resembles our own dystopian present. People clamor to make physical contact with celebrities and offer thousands of dollars for their stray eyelashes or strands of hair. Handheld screens enable users to track the precise movements of friends and lovers. Powerful corporations based in the Bay Area promise increased well-being to the entire American populace—or at least to those who can pay for their services.

But there is one major innovation in the world Williams describes: the Apricity machine, exclusive property of the Apricity Corporation. Its name derived from an archaic word for “the feeling of sun on one’s skin in the winter,” the machine provides clients with customized recommendations to increase their happiness. The process is simple and painless: a “contentment technician” presses a cotton swab against the inside of a client’s cheek, inserts a saliva sample into the machine, and reads out the results. Most people receive recommendations of the bland and wholesome variety (more on this point later): Eat tangerines on a regular basis. Arrange fresh flowers. Put a warm blanket on your bed. Still, they seem to work; the service has a 99.97% approval rating.

This intriguing premise allows Williams to explore a number of weighty philosophical questions: What makes us happy? How can we know? Even if we did know, would this knowledge actually help us become happier? What, if any, are the drawbacks to pursuing happiness? Why might a person choose to forego this pursuit? Told through multiple perspectives, the novel examines how a range of characters address and confront these questions.

The central figure is a contentment technician named Pearl, chosen for her position because she possesses—so her boss tells her—“an aura of wooly contentment, like you have a blanket draped over your head.” Phlegmatic disposition notwithstanding, Pearl is deeply worried about her son Rhett, a thoughtful sixteen-year-old recovering from a severe eating disorder. In one section of narration, Rhett refers in passing to Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in which the ecstatic happiness of an entire community is founded upon the horrific suffering of a single child. The allusion is apropos, since Rhett himself displays a powerful inclination to resist the culture of happiness maximization around him, refusing his mother’s requests to sit for the Apricity machine. In the terms of another dystopian cultural touchstone, he is the kind of kid who would take the red pill.

A number of the novel’s most compelling storylines explore the relationship between individual happiness and social harmony. One chapter focuses on Pearl’s boss Carter, whose standard contentment plan features such platitudes of happiness maximization as “Adopt a dog” and “Smile at your wife.” One day, however, trying an updated machine, he receives a new and surprising result: “Remove all chairs from your office except your own.” This recommendation gives Carter free rein to act on his inherent desire for dominance, and he soon discovers how much he enjoys the confusion and humiliation of his chair-less subordinates. Relatedly, we learn that the standard Apricity machines redact “violent or illegal actions,” replacing them with asterisks. After Pearl swabs Rhett’s cheek in secret and runs his sample through the machine, she finds to her dismay that his contentment plans consists of a single asterisk, prompting her and readers alike to wonder what perverse or destructive desires are hiding behind this inscrutable punctuation mark.

Williams has created a world rich with narrative possibilities, but some of these are not pursued as fully as they might have been. Carter’s experiments with the modified machine are the focus of one early chapter, after which point the novel essentially abandons his story, despite the important questions it has raised about how this culture handles those who derive happiness from exerting power over others. Another chapter is narrated by Rhett’s stepmother Val, who works as a “freelance namer,” helping companies determine what their products should be called. Tied with Rhett for the book’s most interesting character, Val has a traumatic, disturbing past about which she refuses to speak, and her narration is punctuated by fascinating observations about the histories of words (including “stepmother,” “mask,” “cruel,” and “machine”). But the novel doesn’t give her nearly the attention she deserves. We also don’t hear much about the production of Apricity machines, and the lack of detail on this subject feels like a missed opportunity, since attending to the chain of production might have allowed Williams to investigate further how fulfillment for some is founded upon the exploitation of others.

Another word root relevant to Williams’ novel is that of “happiness” itself, which comes from the Germanic “hap,” meaning “chance” or “fate.” Implicitly, the novel invokes this linguistic history by raising questions about the extent to which happiness truly is a matter of individual control, even in a culture saturated with technological devices meant to facilitate its attainment. On the one hand, some of Williams’ characters simply seem fated to enjoy more happiness than others. On the other hand, the ones on the road to happiness may not be those we would initially expect. At one point, trying to track down an Apricity machine, Rhett thinks that, if he’s lucky, one of Pearl’s will be stored in the closet. Upon finding the machine just where he had hoped, Rhett thinks, “it turns out that I am lucky.”

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