Joy Castro
Arcade Publishing ($25.00)

by Anne F. McCoy

You might be tempted to pass over The Truth Book because of its appearance. But in spite of the subtitle and the blood-red dust jacket, this is not a sensationalized story. There are no clear-cut good guy/bad guy themes. Neither is this a work of exhaustive journalism about Jehovah’s Witnesses, although throughout the book Joy Castro gives clear, factual, and fair explanations of beliefs and practices. Every person we meet is presented fairly, in all their humanness. While she is forthright about abuses which she experienced, Castro also introduces us to kind individuals and caring families, relating her own particular experience in spare and lyrical prose. At times it felt like poetry to me, as if the page were inundated by white space, although it's not. While there is this clean sense to the prose, the details are lush and specific.

The Truth Book’s compelling narrative is structured as a collage. The fluid boundaries and the movement across time and place are occasionally disorienting, but it does serve the reader: Castro spares us from slogging chronologically through difficult details as told from a child’s perspective. Our narrator is the adult Castro, a woman in her mid-thirties whose gentle sensibility guides us throughout.

We meet Castro’s mother, former show girl turned Jehovah’s Witness, who is easily embarrassed by her children. After Castro’s first dance recital at age six, she told her daughter that she looked like an elephant on the stage. The attention of her father, a pilot who took her on adventures throughout Europe, counter-balanced her mother’s sarcasm somewhat, until his extramarital affairs led to a divorce.

In her mother’s second marriage to a man from the Jehovah’s Witness community, there existed a ready-made opportunity for abuse, as there is in any religion which teaches that the husband has the unquestioned right to rule his household however he wants. Castro’s stepfather subjected them to bizarre regulations and increasing isolation. He put locks on the refrigerator and kitchen cupboards. There were rules regarding portions at meals. If he had two sandwiches, her mother was permitted one, Castro one-half, her younger brother one-quarter. After two years of forced starvation, at the age of fourteen, Castro managed to escape.

Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that because Jehovah loves the truth, people should always speak the truth. When she was young, the author found that this did not apply to every truth. In The Truth Book—which Castro wrote reluctantly, at the urging of those close to her—she finally bears witness to her experiences.

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Michael Finkel
Harper Collins ($25.95)

by Elaine Margolin

Michael Finkel made a serious mistake. An up and coming reporter for the New York Times Magazine, Finkel had just returned from the Ivory Coast where he had spent weeks researching a story on the child slave trade there. While meeting with his editor, he outlined how he was going to approach his piece, which was slotted to be the cover story for an upcoming issue. She nixed his ideas, instructing him instead to weave an emotional and biographical narrative around one of the children he interviewed, the kind of story that would grab the reader’s heart. Finkel spent the next few weeks in a wine- and sleep-deprived mania, producing a piece of writing he considered to be his best. The only problem was it wasn’t true; the boy at the center of the article was a composite of many different people rolled into one. Finkel got caught and was fired; full of shame and regret, he retreated to his home in Montana to lick his wounds.

Tortured by his own reckless behavior, Finkel wondered how he could have let this happen. A passionate and extremely gifted young writer, he had spent his entire life “trying to become Michael Finkel of the New York Times. Now, after scarcely a year, I was finished.” Children lie in order to master the world around them. It is a self-protective act, usually devoid of malevolence; the lie allows them to imagine themselves as stronger than they are. Adults lie for similar reasons; they need to create an image of themselves that is better than the one they have. But as Finkel found out, we have zero tolerance for our journalistic thieves, be they Steven Glass or Jayson Blair or the gentle but still culpable Doris Kearns Goodwin. Finkel spends a good portion of this book meditating on the forces and pressures that led to his personal downfall, but ultimately, he steps up to the plate and takes full responsibility for his actions. His struggle is for his own redemption and our forgiveness.

Finkel’s chance for salvation arrives unexpectedly when a reporter calls and tells him that Christian Longo, a highly intelligent young man on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, has been arrested for murdering his family. He had been picked up in Mexico impersonating a reporter—Michael Finkel of the New York Times. In prison awaiting trial, Longo was willing to speak about his life and the crimes he was accused of, but only to the real Finkel.

Thus begins a year-long odyssey for Finkel, who begins a highly charged and often turbulent relationship with Longo through letters, phone calls, and visits. As he attempts to analyze Longo’s descent, Finkel begins to look at his own, and the similarities he sees disturb him. Both men are too comfortable lying. Both have trouble with intimacy, particularly with women. Both seem to feel compelled to operate under a continual umbrella of performance pressure that crushes their spirit. Both are obsessed with their place in the world, their egos dependent upon maintaining a notion of their own uniqueness. Ultimately, however, True Story shows that Finkel is no longer willing to dance around the truth; his revelations about himself demonstrate the workings of a first-rate mind, a terrific journalist, and perhaps most importantly, an honest man.

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Michel Houellebecq
McSweeney’s Books ($18)

by Joel Turnipseed

Michel Houellebecq’s novels have had a violent reception—his last, Platform, landed him in court for inciting racial hatred. Even his supporters have praised him at an uneasy distance, praising his work as caustic satire. Céline’s name comes up a lot. Now, with the translation of his first prose work, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, we have one more turn of the ophthalmologist’s gauge to determine whether Houellebecq’s cynicism reflects a clear but dark hilarity or a kind of sinister, as yet unmeasured, revulsion.

His choice of subject in H. P. Lovecraft certainly raises the stakes in considering the latter, and though Houellebecq calls the book “a kind of novel,” it is more a kind of proxy blueprint for his later work—as when he writes of Lovecraft’s sensibility:

The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. This is what will finally prevail…. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure “Victorian fictions.” All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.

As an appreciation (and Lovecraft is certainly due an appreciation, with Dorna Khazeni’s translation of Houellebecq more-or-less coincident with the Library of America’s superb selection of Lovecraft’sTales), this is somewhat fantastic, but as literary appropriation it is indispensable. Throughout, one notes that maybe only Vargos Llosa’s Perpetual Orgy is as good as both art and homage.

After reading Houellebecq reading Lovecraft, you come to see not only the affinities, but the degree to which Houellebecq has prepared Lovecraft for us, making him available to us as readers of Houellebecq, so much so that certain sentences seem as though they could come from either man’s work:

… free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. The liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

If this hadn’t come from Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulu,” you wouldn’t have been surprised to find it in Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles. What Houellebecq detests in refried hippies and the veiled, violent inhabitants of Parisian suburbs is the same thing Lovecraft found in the Jazz Age flappers and multi-colored immigrants crowding the streets of Brooklyn. If humanity at its most liberated, wildest diversity is all this, perhaps the only rational reaction is horror—and a retreat from realism into mythology.

In both Houellebecq’s and Lovecraft’s case, however, this mythology is not a dippy sugar-coated paean to our better natures, but rather a further, more scientifically dissected and refined presentation of the state of things as they already are—archaic in their ruthlessness and scientific in their presentation of what lies between our conscious moments, unable as these are to fully realize the complete (and immanently strange) dimensions in which they (and we) exist. Where Lovecraft has created a world of Cthulu and the Necronomicon, Houellebecq has turned the same naturalistic exactitude to the even more terrifying (if only because more banal and recognizable) horrors of our near absolute reduction to outputs of the functions of sex and money. Houellebecq doesn’t achieve the parallel (and infinitely expanding) world of Lovecraft, but their methods (exposed in a wonderful stretch of Houellebecq’s Lovecraft entitled “Technical Assault”) are the same.

There’s great stuff here, and any writer will marvel at the care with which Houellebecq has broken down Lovecraft. Still, neither writers’ characters are thick in the ribs with humanity, but rather gaunt with disgust, and Houllebecq’s apologies (either for Lovecraft or himself, as he put it in Whatever: "clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight…always seemed pure bullshit to me, I’m sorry to say”) are not always convincing. Lovecraft is certainly fascinating, and Houellebecq does a good job of showing how he is both the Bingham of our most exotic fears and the Agassiz of our wildest dreams (as well as a creator of algorithmic worlds that can take the pages of The National Geographic and Nature and reflect them back to us as an endless catalogue of horrors), but at some point, the work of both men seems as much an evasion of humanity as it does a rejection of it.

They are, both of them, writers who can be easy to detest (they detest back), while being equally hard to put down. If their moods, whether registered as fantastic horror or clinically-diagnosed disgust, seem too-confined to a limited register of possibility, it may well be out of an admirable artistic purity. Then again, depending on how the lenses shift, it may well be out of human failure. That Houellebecq and Lovecraft have fully embraced both purity and failure there’s no doubt; there’s only the question of whether these have been twined into art—and a lot to wonder about how far we should follow them. Whatever your view, Lovecraft’s tales and Houellebecq’s appreciation are endlessly fascinating prisms of fear and loathing.

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Michael Downing
Shoemaker & Hoard ($23)

by Carrie Mercer

Described by one Native American as “the white man cutting an inch off the bottom of his blanket and sewing it to the top to make it longer,” the idea of Daylight Saving has been mocked and championed in equal measure for more than two hundred years. In Spring Forward, Michael Downing chronicles a surprisingly checkered and bizarre history, including arguments between federal, state and local governments. Lobbying efforts came from such diverse groups as farmers, railroads, retailers, Broadway, the beef industry, and even church clergy.

The general public has the impression that Daylight Saving was invented for farmers, but as Downing makes abundantly clear, farmers were vehemently against it from the start. Among many non-farmers who contended the benefits of Daylight Saving was A. Lincoln Filene, chairman of Boston’s largest department store. “Most farm products are better when gathered with dew on,” he claimed. In fact, many crops could not be harvested until the sun had dried the dew off. Ironically, Daylight Saving actually had the effect of lengthening the farmer’s workday, since his schedule was determined by two different clocks—the natural one and the one controlled by his local government.

Who started this nonsense in the first place? And why? The blame (or credit, depending on your viewpoint) can be spread among many characters, as Downing notes. Although Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion may be the first on record, no one is really sure anymore if he meant it as a joke. In the early 20th century, English architect William Willett lobbied parliament after having a revelation that the early morning summer sun was being wasted on sleeping townsfolk, that they should be out enjoying the extra light. Claims of energy savings and workplace efficiency resulting from Daylight Saving are still popular. Such claims have never been substantiated, despite the fact that the U.S. government has been using such reasoning to implement, and even extend, Daylight Saving since World War I.

In general, having more late afternoon/evening hours of light has made the most difference in people’s leisure time, increasing how much they spend (in time and money) on activities such as barbeque and “pleasure driving,” making the beef and barbeque industries as well as auto and fuel manufacturers heavy lobbyers for Daylight Saving. Of course, entertainment industries that depend on people going indoors for the evening—including Broadway shows and movie theatres across the nation—lobby just as hard against Daylight Saving. One worldwide change that Daylight Saving can be credited with is a huge increase in the number of people playing golf, due to later hours of daylight. And while there are less than five million farmers left in the U.S.—about 2 percent of the labor force—there are now over 30 million golfers.

Who knew an hour could make so much difference? If only it were that simple. As Downing details, even when communities have agreed to participate in Daylight Saving, there is still no consensus on how long it should last—anywhere from three to six months. This lack of agreement has created some ridiculous arrangements, such as the 1966 case of one office building in St. Paul, Minnesota, in which half the floors—those working for the city—observed Daylight Saving, and the other half—those working for the county—did not.

As entertaining as Downing makes the madness over Daylight Saving, he does an even better job of putting this one bone of contention into the larger context of worldwide timekeeping. His discussions of Greenwich Mean Time, Stalin’s failed five-day week in the 1920s, and the aggressive race between countries to be the first—by way of an altered clock—to arrive in the new millennium, give the reader an idea of how powerful a tool timekeeping is, and what huge economic and cultural forces depend on it.

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Eileen Chang
Translated by Andrew F. Jones
Columbia University Press ($27.50)

by Lucas Klein

By now, Chinese Communist Correctness has long since receded, changing Eileen Chang’s writing from being a guilty pleasure to simply a pleasure. The trend began in the West, as Chinese literature scholars in American universities during the ’60s promoted her vision and style as supreme in 20th-century Chinese literature. Readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan then discovered, or re-discovered, an individual talent, opening the mainland floodgates by the end of the ’80s. And yet, while the resurgence of her popularity can be traced to the American academy, her essays have, until now, been inaccessible to English readers.

Chang’s deft and sympathetic translator, Andrew Jones, an accomplished academic who has also translated the fiction of Yu Hua, has given Chang an English that suggests her own fluency and comfort in the language. Indeed, some of her essays were originally written in English, then expanded in Chinese, from which Jones translated—or “triangulated”—for this volume.

The context of Chang’s writing in English suggests the nature of her danger for a Communist reading public: her essays describe her upper-class background, and are forthright about fleeing war-ravished China in favor of English-style university education in Hong Kong, but Jones’s footnotes reveal an even more sinister truth. Much of her English journalism was printed in a pro-Axis periodical published in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Chinese writers, especially those still read and studied today, matched their opposition to Japanese imperialism with an increasingly vehement leftism. Chang’s resilience against social pressure from the rest of the Chinese intellectual community displays an impressive strength, and despite writing from an occupied zone for collaborationist magazines, she would have called herself apolitical. Daily life, human interactions, and even fashion concerned her too much, it seems, to have been bothered by politics.

Daily life, human interactions, and fashion are—particularly for 1940s China—considered female topics, and if Eileen Chang has any political dreams, they are for a space in which women’s problems can be accepted and considered. “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” in which she presents the preceding several hundred years of Chinese history as a tale of its fashions, even allows for an intersection of politics and panache: “In times of political turmoil and social unrest—the Renaissance in Europe, for instance—there will always be a preference for tight-fitting clothes, light and supple, allowing for quickness of movement . . . During the days when the revolution in China was brewing, Chinese clothes were nearly bursting at the seams.” She even portrays fashion as a response to oppression: “In a time of political chaos, people were powerless to improve the external conditions governing their lives. But they could influence the environment immediately surrounding them, that is, their clothes.”

Advocating for a women’s view of history, though, does quite not make Eileen Chang a feminist. Her essay “Speaking of Women” spends pages cataloguing sexist statements in an English pamphlet called Cats (along the lines of “Time is money, which is why the more time women spend in front of their mirrors, the more money they must spend in a boutique,” or “Two women can never make friends as quickly as two men, because there are more secrets between them”), but she follows it with no piquant rebuttal. Rather, her response is measured, mild, even meek. While she begins with a fine attack against generalizations—“The price of such so-called wisdom is a cheapening of the truth, for how could it be possible to sum up all women in a single phrase?”—she later depicts women in particularly unflattering terms: “In a democratic system … the problem is that most women are even less able to govern themselves capably than men.” While her topic is ostensibly egalitarian, her tone is aloof, whether writing about women in government or moralizing that, “when poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.”

The Chinese word for essay includes the character for “scattered,” and the general style of Chinese prose allows for much more meandering than the English version of the genre. Not surprisingly, some of Chang’s best moments are when she strays from the assigned topic, talking about Japanese children in an essay “On Dance,” or Chinese attitudes to the law while ostensibly writing about “Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes.” The entire essay “Seeing with the Streets” is a grand digression, demonstrating the refined vision of an exacting author as she free associates through an urban neighborhood.

But despite the roaming elegance of her longer pieces, the freshest pieces are the most clipped, those mini-essays where Chang gives herself no room to meander. One, “On Carrots,” plops into a meta-nonfiction; recording a quick dialogue about carrots, Chang elaborates only with:

I secretly jotted down this little speech, without changing even a single word and then couldn’t help laughing to myself, because all I needed to do was add a title—“On Carrots”—and a stylish little essay appeared on the page before me. . . And its wonder lies in brevity: by the time you start reading, it’s already over, which only makes you ponder its meaning all the more.

When she died in 1995, Chang—whose Chinese name Zhang Ailing is a transliteration of her English name—had been living in the United States for forty years. She had stopped writing years earlier, and her reputation had fluctuated, but she had remained a highpoint of Shanghai culture at the low point of the city. This new translation of her essays, providing in English what was composed under its influence, fulfills her charge by allowing us into that zone between two poles.

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Nadeem Aslam
Alfred A. Knopf ($25)

by Scott Esposito

In Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam develops a set of relationships that reveals the ways in which love—often abetted by religion and nationalism—can divide people instead of bring them together. Dasht-e-Tanhaii, Aslam’s stylized community of Pakistani immigrants to England, is "a place of Byzantine intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds."

Within this community, the lovers Jugnu and Chanda appear to have been murdered for living together without marrying, and Chanda’s two brothers are the suspected killers. As he tries to get on with his life, Jugnu's brother Shamas must endure the silent scorn of Kaukab, his fundamentalist wife, because he was permissive of Jugnu's lifestyle. Soon, however, Shamas meets a beautiful Muslim woman named Suraya and falls in love. Unbeknownst to him, however, he is being used: she must marry Shamas in order to remarry the husband who drunkenly divorced her one night since, under Islamic law, a divorced couple can only remarry after the wife has married another man.

This plot may appear busy, but over the course of almost 400 pages it proves sparse indeed. Instead, what fills the cavernous pages of Aslam’s book are deep, lyric studies of Shamas and Kaukab and their relationships to Jugnu, the other residents of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and their three estranged children. Aslam's talent for rendering the complexities of many difficult relationships is substantial, and the more we read, the better we understand each character as he or she develops throughout the novel. It is this that makes Maps for Lost Lovers mesmerizing.

In the book’s first section, Aslam writes that as a young immigrant to England, Shamas's wife Kaukab was so excited at the prospect of learning English that she filled a notebook with “jumbled up” proverbs she had overheard. Aslam presents a list of these, the last of which is “Heaven is other people.” As Aslam explains, “The last she had heard and remembered correctly, Hell is other people, but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one—no people no civilization—would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?”

Kaukab’s misappropriation of Sartre’s aphorism is emblematic of the greater paradox that Aslam relentlessly drives at throughout Maps for Lost Lovers. Kaukab is a sweet, caring person who would never truly believe that that other people make the world into a hell. For her, relationships are rewarding and fundamental. Yet, unwillingly, Kaukab’s prejudices often create a hellish setting for her friends, her family, and herself. Her rigid fundamentalism and her continual disapproval of the ones she loves send her husband into the arms of another woman and prevent her three children from ever coming home. Although this paradox may be most easily seen in Kaukab, it is no less present for Shamus, Suraya, or many other characters. Tragically, instead of coming together in a time of despair, they make things even more difficult for one another. The question Aslam ponders in presenting this paradox is whether his characters are tragically flawed, simply incapable of doing better, or if they are coerced into such things by their memory of Pakistan and their interpretation of Islam.

Such subject matter may make Maps for Lost Lovers, at times, a depressing read, but it is nonetheless a very worthwhile one. Throughout, the book is buoyed by Aslam’s lovely prose, which is saturated with imagery to the point that virtually no object or feeling is presented without a striking image to accompany it. A slow book that casts a very deep gaze, Maps for Lost Lovers is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on powerful forces con drive us apart: nationalism, religion, and, most of all, love.

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Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday ($24.95)

by Kevin Dole

From the references to The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales in the jacket copy, one might expect Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted to establish mainstream literary credibility for its author. It doesn’t: Haunted is no more or less literary than any other book by Palahniuk. Similarly, early reference in the text to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and the Villa Diodati—the country house where Mary Shelley and friends created, among other tales, the story of Frankenstein and the modern vampire archetype—might make one expect the book to be a horror novel. It isn’t: Haunted, while often disturbing and occasionally disgusting, it is not a very scary book.

Haunted is, despite all indicators otherwise, a black satire, like most of Palahniuk’s work. What differentiates Haunted from his other fiction is that it is a collection of short tales told by disparate, desperate characters, much like the classical works of literature that it so conspicuously mentions. The storytellers are all participants in an unconventional writers' retreat, held by the extremely wealthy and aged eccentric Mr. Whittier—who, in the grand tradition of wealthy eccentrics given to odd experiments, is not who he seems (his secret being, in the tradition of Palahniuk, bizarre enough to make one simultaneously laugh aloud and squirm)—in an abandoned theater. There the novel’s 18 narrators spend three months in isolation in hopes of creating their magnum opus.

The stories that they produce, masterpiece or no, comprise the text. This structure is not without its flaws. It allows Palahniuk to explore his major themes from multiple angles, but despite this freedom Haunted feels almost mathematically rote. Each chapter is a self-contained story. Each story is prefaced by an unremarkable prose poem that introduces the character and establishes the circumstance of the story. In between stories we learn how the group is coping with confinement in the face of ever increasing privations (this connective tissue is told in collective third person, the same “we” that presumably narrates the poems). But while predictable, the real reason that this structure proves problematic is that it places total reliance on the individual stories, which are a decidedly mixed bag.

Most of them, thankfully, are at least worth reading, and some are even great. Included is the notorious “Guts”—which, along with “Exodus” and “Speaking Bitterness,” shows Palahniuk at his provocative best. The final story, “Obsolete,” is an allegorical tale of speculative fiction that would have been at home in the best of the ’70s sci-fi pulps, and “Hot Potting” would make the high point in any horror anthology. But too many others are merely mediocre. Readers quickly learn that each story will contain a Shocking Twist, and while always inventive, the twists are sometimes desperate in their outrageousness. Stories like “Punch Drunk” and “The Nightmare Box” just try too hard and are the worse for it.

The relationship between the stories is also confusing. A collection of short fiction needn’t necessarily be cohesive, but much like the characters that tell them, these stories just don’t get along with each other. “Dissertation” and “Post-Production” don’t even seem to occupy the same reality. And Haunted takes a bewildering turn toward the paranormal in its second half; it’s difficult to reconcile later explorations of werewolves and psychic powers with earlier stories of personal failure and devastating irony. Most of the stories succeed on their individual merits but fail when taken collectively, especially since the subtitle tells us that Haunted is supposed to be a novel.

The overarching narrative shows Palahniuk at his worst. As befits a group of people so damaged, the characters quickly move from self-pity to self-destruction. Unfortunately, they all have suggestive names like The Reverend Godless and Miss Sneezy. These pseudonyms and the structure of the theater itself are probably meant to recall “The Masque of the Red Death” but instead the action takes on pastiche, like the end solution to a session of the board game Clue— "Comrade Snarky in the Blue Velvet Lobby with the Chef's Knife!" The mayhem wears out quickly, becoming profoundly ineffective and at times incoherent. Palahniuk wants to talk about self-sabotage and our "culture of blame"; he wants to address the connections between storytelling, victimhood, and voyeurism. He does this with some success inside the characters’ stories, but in the collective narrative he feels it necessary to tell us explicitly, and this weakens the work.

Haunted starts to come together as a book at the end, despite the supernaturalism; it nearly closes with a tone that's almost hopeful (in a Samuel Beckett sort of way), but its grace is quickly dashed by pointless, mean-spirited irony. This is a book that can be admired for its complexity and ambition, but will likely be remembered for its failure.

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Siddhartha Deb
The Ecco Press ($24.95)

by Niranjana Iyer

The Republic of India is often imagined in the shape of a diamond, with Kashmir and Kerala marking the north and south, and Bombay and Calcutta defining the western and eastern regions respectively. Such a map, however, would be incomplete; north of Calcutta lies a fragile strip of land (no more than twenty miles wide) that connects the Indian ‘mainland’ to the seven hill states of the north-east. Bounded by Burma, China, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, these states form one of the least-explored regions of the world, and are the setting and subject of Siddhartha Deb’s An Outline of the Republic.

Amrit Singh is a Delhi-educated journalist who works for a sleepy Calcutta newspaper named (inappropriately enough) the Sentinel. Going through the newspaper files, he chances upon a photograph of a young woman being held at gunpoint by two masked men. A note states that the woman is a porn actress killed by a north-eastern rebel group named MORLS, as a warning to those engaging in “corrupt activities.” Posted to the region on a routine assignment for the Sentinel, Amrit decides to privately investigate the photograph, partly out of curiosity and partly because a German acquaintance hints that his magazine in Tubingen will pay well for an article on the picture. The story, Amrit is instructed, must portray “the mystery and sorrow of India through the story of the woman in the photograph.”

North-eastern India, the reader learns, is rich in oil; the locals, however, have not benefited from the oil wells constructed by the Delhi government. Rebel groups are hence numerous, and have long been fomenting minor trouble, so as to convey their frustration and resentment to the central government. Deb introduces into this real-life scenario the rebel group MORLS (Movement Organized to Resuscitate the Liberation Struggle), which casts itself as a guardian of morality. MORLS’s activities include ordering women to dress modestly, forcing prostitutes to give up their trade, and threatening drug users with violence unless they kick the habit.

An isolated event in a remote location is thus revealed to be no less than a microcosm of the global conflicts of our age. Boundaries and borders—both physical and imagined—are fragile; nothing is one-sided in this novel. The German magazine is guilty of desiring to reduce India to a snappy sound bite, but Amrit Singh, in search of an easy-to-market story that might grant him financial freedom, is no less culpable. The Delhi government may have suffered under the rule of imperial Britain not long ago, but it is now quite content to take advantage of a far-away people in a faraway place.

As Amrit travels to the state of Manipur, and then across the border to Burma in search of his story, reality and illusion begin to blur. The woman in the photograph might not have been a porn actress. She might not be dead. The photograph might have been staged, either by the Indian government to discredit the rebels, or by the rebels themselves, as a warning to the local population. As Amrit goes deep into the region, the difference between the center and the periphery too becomes shadowy—Delhi is no longer the locus, but an unreal and increasingly irrelevant place.

Shades of Heart of Darkness indeed; in fact, An Outline of the Republic is prefaced by a quotation from Conrad “Do you see the story? Do you see anything?” Amrit is always searching for an objective truth, the real story under the layers of narrative, and the novel never veers from the viewpoint of a dispassionate observer.

This self-consciously journalistic tone, however, sometimes leads to the prose taking on an “explaining” note. Manipur is described as having “the highest rate of educated unemployment in the region, rampant drug use, promiscuity, AIDS, and regular violence with government forces as well as ethnic clashes.” Describing the diversity of passengers on a bus, Deb writes that it “felt like a microcosm of the region, indeed of the nation.” At its best, however, the novel is a clear-eyed declaration that nothing less than the truth should do—however complicated and elusive that truth might be. A subtle exploration of identity and conflict, without a whiff of exoticism, An Outline of the Republic is a timely addition not just to writings on India, but to the literature of the peripheries of the world, making the reader question whether ‘far-away’ is perhaps closer than previously imagined.

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Lance Olsen
Chiasmus Press ($12)

by Scott Esposito

Early in 10:01, the accomplished new experimental novel from Lance Olsen, we're told that movie directors employ a technique called a zip pan, in which "the camera moves so quickly the image in between the original subject and its successor is blurred." This is far from trivial information; 10:01 is constructed of about 100 two-page vignettes connected by the literary equivalent of a zip pan. Each vignette briefly descends into the consciousness of one of roughly 50 characters, all of whom are connected by the fact that they are watching a movie in AMC Theater #10 at the Mall of America, the Bloomington, Minnesota, monstrosity that, with 520 stores, an indoor amusement park, and a walk-through aquarium, is purported to be the largest mall in the country.

It's an apt setting for a book that attempts to understand how Americans today process the ever more information-rich world around them. Rather than organizing his book around a discernible plot, Olsen makes an exploration of this idea the book's main attraction, including tiny clues in each vignette. Although some the vignettes are linked and some of the characters are visited more than once, most often we're left to develop our own connections between "shots."

By structuring 10:01 like a movie and setting the book during a movie screening, Olsen suggests that we make sense of the daily onslaught of mediated, superficial interactions by perceiving consciousness as little movies that run inside our heads. He reminds us that the typical movie consists of roughly 500-1,000 shots, paralleled in our own lives by the hundreds of advertisements and seemingly endless barrage of information we are subjected to each day. Olsen's book trades heavily in cinematic metaphors (e. g. comparing the rapid eye motions that make up perception to the flicker of frames during a screening), and throughout the book film techniques are adapted into literary equivalents, such as heading each vignette with the minute, second, and hundredth of a second at which it takes place.

The vignettes themselves range from surreal, to bizarre, to comical, to stream of consciousness, to poignant, perhaps duplicating our daily range of sensory input. Like the many pieces of information leveled at our precious senses, some of the vignettes are more enjoyable than others, but part of the pleasure in reading Olsen's book is that—good or bad—we know that we'll soon move on to the next hit. In a longer book with longer sections, Olsen's style might have become tiresome, but at a brisk 190 pages, 10:01, like a chaotic, quick trip through a busy mall, never has the chance to drag.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

René Steinke
William Morrow ($24.95)

by Garin Cycholl

It’s not sure whether the end of the century will be noted by the striking of typewriter keys or the blast of a horn, but many artists in these days of disposable apocalypse are standing in line for their chance to chronicle the last shovel full of dirt onto the past century. The strange thing is that those notes may have already been compiled by the Baroness's Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, poet, artist, and subject of Holy Skirts, René Steinke’s novelistic exploration of the Baroness’ life, its scraps and fashions. Steinke’s novel chronicles this woman who carves her artistic identity in an age that still believes in the self. Born in Germany, the Baroness ends up in World War I New York and crafts her poems from a common American language—the popular music, conversations, and advertisements that she hears in the streets. Yet, Steinke’s novel is not another example of historical fiction, an imagined life of a living poet. Instead, the novel plays within the linguistic abrasions of the city, the language that Elsa picks up on the streets and within commercial culture. Steinke explores how a world is strung along these gathered bits of language, the poetic and psychological scraps that become the framework in which her artistic life is explored.

Steinke’s fiction measures a life lived out of time, cataloguing Elsa’s seemingly irrational, vacuous poems and how easily she disappears amidst the early century’s passing materiality. In Germany, Elsa hides herself in a man’s second-hand suit and a monocle as easily as men around her hide behind their Kaiser-like mustaches. Among a collection of Berlin chorus girls, Elsa disguises herself with a pair of cardboard breasts that hilariously slide down to the front of her pelvis during a show. Following a lover to New York, she vanishes among the flags hung in the shop windows of a pre-Weimar America. Here, she hones her craft—piecing herself together in language and collecting her wardrobe from things tossed into the trash. Chewing gum wrappers for jewelry. A blinking light positioned above her behind, a cincture that draws the eye of Marcel Duchamp. Her poetry develops as fragments, appearing piecemeal in The Little Review, and modernity breaks like a wave around her, a future strung from the past. She becomes a muse of sorts for the cold but stricken Marcel.

The novel’s central moment opens around a rumored short film in which Man Ray captures Marcel shaving Elsa’s pubic hair. Excited by the prospect of this promised work, another man later asks, “Is (the film) Cubist? Is it Futurist?” Marcel gives his measured explanation, “The Baroness is not a Futurist. She is the future.” Elsa lives and works in anticipation of the film’s release, but when the film is destroyed in processing, Marcel just as coldly explains, “Our friend said the strips stuck together in the chemicals. . . It was an experiment. The technology isn’t ready for us apparently.” The film, and art itself, is the rumor left behind as its material gets swallowed by the enticing, but failed, technology.

Despite Elsa’s verse and outrageous wardrobe, Steinke’s writing depicts the Baroness just as much a rumor, a life overheard. As a girl, Elsa hurls a batch of early poems into the fire when her mother responds to them with nonchalance. In the cities, she throws herself easily from one sexual encounter to another. Others’ charges of “purposelessness” in her life sting her. She breaks into The Little Review’s New York offices in a ferocious attempt to steal negative letters written to the magazine about her poetry. Returning to Paris after World War I, her “aloneness” remains “huge”; she lives in a one-franc apartment with rented furniture.

The easy summation here would be to point to the artist’s fragmentation in the face of modernity, to mumble something about postmodernity “not coming in non-refundable bottles.” Yet in the novel’s narration, Elsa adeptly plays herself as a rumor. The odd thing that Steinke develops here is how Elsa inhabits her own body, while the century seems to disappear around her. Perhaps, this is the artist’s test. Just as a painter-friend reads the wartime daily newspaper with one eye covered, Elsa reads the past. In a moment of defiance, she enters the wing of an Italian museum populated by ancient male nudes and is escorted out by angry guards who fold their hands across her eyes. As an artist, Elsa similarly reads the city, wanting to “write a poem that resembled walking in a crowd across Forty-Second Street.” Amid the shining, chewing gum wrappers and bits of accumulated language, her poems become “happy accidents,” the residue of a life in the city, itself “already a poem” in Elsa’s covered eyes.

Holy Skirts upholds this fragmenting vision of the artist, but not with what Elsa herself would brand “fake melancholy.” As she poses for painters and plays herself on New York’s streets, her art passes as a rumor against the relief of artistic posers and boys going off to war. The ironies are that this rumored art is just as striking and certain as the details of how the poet leaves her own body to find it. And against the poems, the century passes, “gray and loose and unnoticed.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005