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

by John Toren

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press ($14.95)

by Amy Henry

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

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

by Kris Lawson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Roya Movafegh
Full Court Press ($15)

by Kristin Thiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

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

by Douglas Messerli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Tina May Hall
University of Pittsburgh Press ($16.95)

by Tessa Mellas

As a physical object, Tina May Hall's story collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects is a tiny, perfect thing. But then, so are the stories contained therein. Hall’s collection amounts to a mere 150 pages; one senses that when she writes, she spurns computers and stands at a letterpress instead, choosing letters one by one, testing thousands of words in each sentence, arranging and rearranging each possible configuration until she gets it exactly right. That is not to say that the book is “careful,” for that would imply convention, blandness, and a lack of imagination. Hall’s carefulness takes marvelous risks. For all its linguistic precision, the collection is also whimsical, brutal, and structurally experimental, with beats of subtle humor woven in. Though a minimalist, Hall’s sparseness is artful and bold.

At twelve pages, the first story, “Visitations” is the longest in the collection. With her lover out of town, the narrator, a pregnant woodcut artist, copes with the thickening smell of decay as trapped squirrels rot behind her kitchen wall. Though the smell is nauseating to her, it attracts wildlife from the woods— spiders, birds, deer, wasps. The wilding of the domestic sphere calls attention to something amiss in the couple’s relationship, their growing estrangement fueled by the narrator’s propensity toward solitude. She seems a half-wild creature herself, gnawing endlessly at meat, shirking domestication, pushing away the lover who carries yellow squash to her on a two-mile trek through the woods. The brutality of her eating contrasts with the delicate life growing inside her, a bodily change she finds bewildering: “I felt bones slipping where there should have been no bones.” Hall pairs the disorienting psychology of pregnancy with the reciprocal feelings of strangulation and wonder that accompany love, painting a complex narrative with delicate brushstrokes.

Another story, “Skinny Girls’ Constitution and Bylaws,” takes on a different tone, more comical than the first, more fragmented in form, but still with Hall’s stunning prose. The story starts with this one-sentence paragraph: “We will know each other by the way our watches slip from our wrists, the bruises on our knees, our winged shoulder blades tenting silk dresses.” Hall’s descriptions transform a clique of petite schoolgirls into a gaggle of supernatural witches, transparent underwater and invulnerable to nooses. The utter beauty of each line mocks our cultural awe over pre-pubescent thinness. Take this sampling of lines: “When we lift our arms to the moon, there is a sound like branches scraping”; “We will gestate plump happy babies in the bone cages of our pelvises”; “We will donate cells drawn from the doorknobs of our spines, the needle a key turning us”; “We wash in teacups. We chart the stars on our scapulae, make telescopes of thumbs and forefingers.” It is remarkable the number of brilliant lines that Hall fits in these five pages.

The prose in “For Dear Pearl, Who Drowned” is beautiful in a completely different way. Take the story’s second paragraph: “Her knees glow in the shower. She scrubs them hard. They are red and wistful. She has given up on soap. Soap is for sisters taking baths together. Soap tastes like Sunday nights. Now, everything is scrubbing. She scrubs too hard to be clean. It is hard to scrub oneself clean. It is hard to be clean. It is hard to be”. As the protagonist tries to make sense of a drowning, the narrator tries to make sense of language. The sentences are simple, childish. They combine and recombine images. They test different combinations of words to see if a new arrangement will make the plot turn out differently. Paragraphs trail off with no end punctuation, as though the protagonist seeks to avoid pain by leaving sentences unfinished; if one doesn’t verbalize an event in language, perhaps it didn’t happen. The images in the story— of rivers and eggs, wrinkles and teeth, teacups and pills— take on a surreal quality when they are spun through a linguistic game of repetition and reappropriation. The final effect is gut wrenching, making the wordplay a miraculous narrative feat.

While Hall can do tragedy remarkably well, the book hardly performs in just a mournful key. In “The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Meteorologist and Stopped the Rain,” for example, Hall takes us on a light, metafictional romp. She writes, “This is not a love story. If it were, there would be a certain pathos in a woman conjuring a lover out of storm watches and tornado warnings.” The story “How to Remember a Bird,” about a town that births a hole which swallows things— the bakery, reporters, armchairs, staplers, shoes— has dark undertones, but there is a playfulness in Hall’s existentialist spinning of metaphors, that somehow makes that darkness comforting rather than grim. And the six-page “Faith is Three Parts Formaldehyde, One Part Ethyl Alcohol” is surprisingly poignant, narrating a sweet exchange between Rosa, who cut off her pinkie finger to forge a divine link with God, and a man who’s had a tracheotomy and carries in his pocket both a silver voice box and a cassette tape on which his childhood voice sings a song about a spider and a rainstorm.

Hall ends the book in the place where it began: with pregnancy. However, while in the first story the narrator finds herself ill-suited for being a wife and mother, in “All the Day’s Sad Stories,” the series of prose poems that closes the book, a couple cannot get pregnant. While disasters are happening elsewhere, piped in on the evening news, the couple’s mundane routine, filled with all the strategies of those trying to conceive, is marked by futility. Hall infuses even the items they touch at the grocery store— “the paper skins of garlic,” the cantaloupe lifted to the nose to sniff— with sadness. She writes:

It is autumn and late at night and the moon is shriveling like a mum. Mercy buys olives, soda water, bright red pistachios. She has cravings; sometimes she licks salt off her index finger if there is nothing else in the house. The store is air-conditioned and fluorescent. There is a frost warning for tonight. Mercy and Jake wrapped their shrubs with burlap, and now it looks like a row of decapitated heads rings their house. The sliding doors at the front of the store whisper. Mercy has a hard time triggering automatic things— doors, faucets, towel dispensers. She spends a good portion of her time in public waving her hands at electronic eyes.

Domesticity takes on a certain quiet beauty in this final piece. There is beauty in each hiccup and child-sized yogurt cup, in “a bouquet of icicles pilfered from the bus shelter’s overhang, sharp as knives, already melting,” and in “the miniature trees [that] have outgrown their shapes.” It seems that Mercy and Jake’s inability to birth what they crave, to turn something as vulnerable and potentially imaginary as love into a child, is what makes them notice these small beautiful things. While their longings are left unfulfilled, ours as readers are quenched, for Hall has birthed her tiny perfect things over and over by magically reconfiguring the simplest words.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Orson Scott Card
Subterranean ($35)

by William Alexander

Orson Scott Card has rewritten Hamlet. The back of this slim novella boasts that once we have read this "revelatory version of the Hamlet story, Shakespeare's play will be much more fun to watch—because now you'll know what's really going on." The author has previously updated other Shakespearean plays, rendering them more intelligible to modern audiences while supposedly retaining the “flavor” of the originals.

Thomas and Harriet Bowdler did similar editorial work in 1818—mostly by removing any and all references to sex. (They had to avoid Measure for Measure entirely.) From them we get the word bowdlerize: "to remove material that is considered improper or offensive from a text or account, esp. with the result that it becomes weaker or less effective." Card himself makes the comparison in an introduction to his "translation" of The Taming of the Shrew, and answers the implicit accusation that he is producing Diet Shakespeare through prurient censorship:

It seems to me that we might rather lose our contempt for Bowdler’s attempt to make Shakespeare watchable to the audience of his time, and realize that the standards of taste and decorum change from age to age, and it is not at all unreasonable to make such temporary changes in the script as will allow a play to continue to find an audience—as long as the original remains available, so it can be restored to public view when tastes change again. See intro here

Fair enough. Every new performance of the Bard is also an act of interpretation, sometimes a drastic and transformative one. We still have authoritative versions of the scripts afterwards, to be reedited and reinterpreted. However, Card's essay concludes with the following:

The purpose is to present Taming of the Shrew in a way that recovers, not the original text of Shakespeare’s play, but the original experience of it—a fast-moving, instantly comprehensible, pun- and bawdy-filled, ironic, self-parodying comedy with a legitimate moral lesson about the relationship between man and woman in marriage.

Note that he considers it a virtue for a text to be "instantly comprehensible," as though it were a very bad thing to confront an audience with something they don't already know, understand, and believe. Also note the troubling idea that The Taming of the Shrew carries a "legitimate moral lesson" about gender roles.

Such troubling undercurrents become gale force winds in Hamlet’s Father. In this adaptation, Hamlet was never close to his father. The prince is unfazed and emotionally indifferent to the old king's death, feels no sense of betrayal when his mother speedily remarries, and thinks that Claudius will make a perfectly good monarch. Hamlet is also secure in his religious faith, with absolute and unshakable beliefs about the nature of death and the afterlife. He isn't particularly hung up on Ophelia, either. Throughout the novella, Prince Hamlet displays the emotional depth of a blank sheet of paper.

Card has completely removed the dramatic stakes and haunting questions posed by the play, and the threadbare result is a failure of narrative craft on every level. Only one question remains: Is the ghost of Hamlet's father really a ghost, or is it instead a demonic liar? (Both, as it turns out.) But most of the novella is filled with pedantic moralizing, made all the more bland by Hamlet's smug and uncomplicated certainty. "Some acts are always right," he insists. "And some are always wrong."

This much is sure: The spirits of the righteous do not walk the earth. They are caught up into heaven, and look no more upon this poor land of shadows, having beheld the light that can be seen only by the pure in heart. My father is here because he was a wicked man. Now he is an angry spirit, and mine are the hands that he has chosen to act out his rage. And yet by justice and ancient law, my hands do belong to him, until his murder be avenged.

This Hamlet will never refer to death as an undiscovered country or wonder what dreams may come in death's sleep. He will never suggest that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. He is "instantly comprehensible," and instantly forgettable.

Neither does Card’s prose retain the flavor of Elizabethan English—or any other kind of flavor. These words taste like saltines without salt:

Horatio brought him his sword. "Laertes is looking for you," he said.
"I don't have time for Laertes. He must know I didn't mean to kill his father," Hamlet said.
"It's not his father," said Horatio. "It's his sister."
"Ophelia? I didn't touch her."
"She killed herself. Walked out into the sea, dressed in her heaviest gown. A funeral gown. Two soldiers went in after her, and a boat was launched, but when they brought her body back, she was dead."
"And for that he wants to kill me?"

In case you missed it, this is the moment when Hamlet first learns about Ophelia's death, and this is the extent of his emotional shock. Card's prince won't be jumping in Ophelia's open grave or daring Laertes to trump his grief.

The extent of the novella's failure is surprising—and embarrassing, given that Card is a skilled veteran novelist and Subterranean a well-respected press. The most polite thing for us to do would be to walk away and quietly forget the whole painful exercise. But Card does not deserve our polite amnesia. His failures should be known and remembered, because the revelation in his "revelatory new version" turns out to be a nightmare of vitriolic homophobia.

Here's the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now "as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house."

Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: "Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we'll be together as I always longed for us to be."

All of this is as horrifying as it is ridiculous. It is not, however, surprising that Orson Scott Card's primary purpose is to slander ten percent of the human race. He recently joined the board of the National Organization for Marriage, an institution which exists solely to crush gay civil rights wherever they emerge. Card has publicly stated that homosexuals will destroy America:

There is a myth that homosexuals are "born that way," and we are pounded with this idea so thoroughly that many people think that somebody, somewhere, must have proved it . . . The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.” See speech here

The neurologist Simon LeVay did, in fact, demonstrate that homosexuals are "born that way" in 1991. Ivanka Savic proved it conclusively in 2008. These are rigorous scientific investigations of human neurobiology. Card's fantasy of abuse, stated outright in his editorial and dramatized—badly—inHamlet's Father, has no factual basis. This should make the slander easy to dismiss, but it is painfully difficult to prove the absence of anything—or to refute someone who presumes to speak for your own unconscious wish.

This kind of psychological violence is easy to inflict. Let's play the same game with Card's portrayal of the Danish prince, and suppose the Hamlet of Hamlet's Father is gay. After all, the prince shows tenderness for Horatio, and only for Horatio. He is physically shocked when, at one point, Ophelia tries to kiss him. Afterwards, he only notices her beauty in the abstract: "She had been a sweet girl, when he knew her years ago; she was a pretty woman now, and though he had no particular desire for any of her tribe, he knew it was wrong to trifle with her." Tribe meaning women here, it’s clear that women delight not Hamlet. Only Horatio delights Hamlet. What's more, the prince was born this way; the book assures us that Gertrude was able to protect her son's innocence from the old king's appetites, and the boy turned out to be gay regardless.

Unable to live happily ever after with Horatio, Hamlet goes half-mad. He hallucinates the ghost of his dead father just to have someone to blame for what he perceives as a hell-bound condition. The tragedy here is that no one gave him an "It's okay to be Takei" button or insisted that he watch Hal Duncan's "It Gets Better" video when he first started thinking about suicide. Shakespeare himself was probably queer. (Go read sonnet #20 if you doubt me.) Hamlet, as re-imagined by Orson Scott Card, is certainly queer. Unfortunately, the prince's literary stepfather is both a bigot and a bowdlerizer. If aught of wonder you would see, look elsewhere.

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

Christopher R. Howard
Seven Stories Press ($14.95)

by Natalie Storey

Christopher Howard’s debut novel, Tea in Ulaanbaatar, begins with a Peace Corps volunteer who, in a drug-induced stupor in an apartment in Ulaanbaatar, finally remembers the lines to a Mongolian poem he has forgotten. “The words appear like the faintest light,” Howard writes. “Like a flash of knives in a cave. The words come to Warren in this high-altitude winter that has deadened the skin of his face and is now creeping inward, eating at his sinuses and teeth.” The poem verifies what Howard’s main character has known all along: his life means nothing in Mongolia. “We sit together / the mountain and I / Until only the mountain remains,” the poem concludes.

The novel’s lyricism accompanies a dark storyline; from the first stunning page, Howard plunges readers into a nightmarish landscape. He describes water so cold it hurts, silverfish and horseflies invading houses, beds, and body cavities, and garbage-littered streets. Of the Gobi desert Howard writes, “Later he heard infant camels screaming in the void and they sounded like human babies.” Warren works as an English teacher, but eventually hooks up with a beautiful, young Mongolian girl who helps him acquire blood tea, a rare hallucinogen. During the drug deals that occupy the latter half of the novel, Warren and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer drug their medical officer. When they accidently kill her, they feed her fingers to a buzzard. Such plot twists, rendered in stark prose, will keep many readers guessing.

Howard casts his main character in the role of the “post tourist” — a traveler who sees with two critical eyes, one turned on himself and the other on the society to which he travels. Although he faces hardships in Mongolia, Warren still prefers it to home, thinking:

In America there is no morning, only the lie of morning, when you scramble to the office lacking the morale to face another day, to dive into work that collected in your cubicle while you had the gall to be sleeping, to earn the funds to allow you to drone through a life consuming, consuming. Even a frigid wasteland is better than that existence.

Warren’s motivations for leaving the United States surface quickly— he seeks only escape from his dissatisfaction—and the book’s major contribution to travel literature lies in this portrait. Rarely do authors strip bare the motivations of Americans traveling and working overseas, often preferring more romanticized versions. However, in Tea of Ulaanbaatar, the moral imperative to help Mongolians gets nullified by the volunteers’ selfish motivations. The Peace Corps bureaucracy hampers the volunteers at each turn. The locals prove hostile. “That’s what Amerik founding fathers could never have understood,” one Mongolian lecturers Warren. “That you would use your freedom for nothing. You Ameriks, fat, and with all your petty dramas, you have enough food, enough housing, and what do you do? Do you make the world a better place? No, you corrupt each other.” Howard holds nothing back in this critique.

In describing Mongolians, however, Howard’s descriptions sometimes read harshly. “The Mongols don’t farm,” Howard writes. “I’ve seen the reports. They literally do not farm. That would take time away from drinking and beating each other senseless.” Howard’s characters frequently refer to the alcoholism of Mongolians. Such observations ring true to the characters but will surely leave a negative impression of Mongolia, a country rarely written about in the United States. Discerning the difference between fact and imaginatively created fiction becomes difficult for any reader unfamiliar with Mongolia. For example, no “blood tea” exists in Mongolia. However, camps of traditional Mongolian tents, called gers, do dot cities and towns. Ultimately, the novel resembles neither Flaubert’s sexualized Arabia nor Conrad’s hopelessly dark and ignorant Africa. Howard’s Mongolia appears bleak, but the harshest treatment of all he reserves for his naïve American characters.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown and Company ($28)

by Rich Gangelhoff

Although the center of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel,The Pale King, does not hold, the writing itself still fascinates. Certainly there were challenges in bringing this final Wallace doorstop to print. Michael Pietsch writes in his Editor’s Note that before his suicide Wallace left “a neat stack of manuscript, twelve chapters totaling nearly 250 pages,” and also material from “hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks [that] contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, notes, and more.” Pietsch describes arranging all this diverse material, much of it written in freestanding sections, as “the most difficult part of editing The Pale King,” and the strain frequently shows. For example, Chapter 1 is a prose poem of Midwestern landscape— it’s great writing, but it feels like it could have been pasted anywhere in the text. Chapter 3, on the other hand, which consists of a two-page conversation between unidentified speakers on masturbation, seems to fit nowhere in the text, and feels more like an outtake from Infinite Jest than anything new from Wallace. Amidst such chaos, the reader cannot be sure which of the resulting inconsistencies and lacunae are editorial gaffes and which are Wallace’s own self-conscious, postmodern narrative disruptions.

The novel really starts in Chapter 2 with Claude Sylvanshine’s airplaning toward Peoria, Illinois, for his promotion at Internal Revenue Service Post 047, the Midwest Regional Examination Center, circa 1985. Sylvanshine is a “fact psychic,” and this vignette is the most hilarious section in the book; while Sylvanshine is at a training session on rental property deductions, he experiences “data incursions of the annual rainfall in Zambia for even-numbered years since 1974.” In another chapter, we meet Leonard Stecyk, an obnoxious boy genius (the picked-on-in-shop-class type), only to read later of his gradual stultification in the IRS, where he does not shine. Also not shining at the IRS is the David Wallace character, “age forty SS no. 975-04-2012,” and Lane Dean, Jr., who impregnates his girl on a picnic table, dutifully marries her, and supports her with his government job. We meet Toni Ware and Mother Tia, trailer trash mother daughter prostitutes, but how they tie in with the main IRS plot never comes clear. Then we skip to “the boy,” not identified until later in the book, when we connect that the “wiggler” (or tax form examiner) who sweats a lot and has anxiety attacks is David Cusk, who we first encountered as an anxiety-ridden high school student. And at the top of the ziggurat sits Mr. DeWitt Glendenning, Jr., arguably the Pale King himself.

You get the idea? It’s a collage, a pastiche of vignettes, and it’s one character after another, albeit backstoried in substantial depth and living color. It’s just that they don’t connect. Even on page 444, we are meeting newly introduced IRS examiners at an after work happy hour, Shane Drinion listening to Meredith Rand for sixty-five pages about her problems—self mutilation and the psychological effects of being beautiful and disturbed by it. The book, at this pace, would probably have ended up with a word count in the Clarissa zone had Wallace been able to finish it, and it might have achieved the grace of something like John Dos Passos’s USA, the characters like spokes in a wheel radiating outward from the IRS center in Peoria.

Still, there is much to recommend the vignettes as they are. The novel smartly addresses the issue of the average hockey mom not knowing how many senators her state has, tracing the history of civics: a 1950s requirement, a ’60s elective, a ’70s pipedream, an ’80s irrelevancy, eroding into today’s incorporated corporate if-I-want-to-rebel-I-can-buy-it attitude. The narrator muses with nostalgia on his own adolescence amidst these times, and this section is highly amusing, as if breathing out bong hits from a rancid couch with the Wallace character. His college days consist of even more wasting away watching soaps, but an accounting class provides the way for the waste case to drift into the IRS recruiting station in “Chicagoland.”

Although the David Wallace character speculates on the nature of dullness and attention, the book is not about boredom or self-help, nor is it the author’s veiled suicide note (sure he mentions suicide, but he also mentions picnics). It is, rather, a deconstruction of the word boredom, which results in the conclusion that the word invented itself, offering the splendid takeaway: “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” Despite being unfinished, The Pale King demonstrates that Wallace took this credo to heart.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Barry Hannah
Grove Press ($27.50)

by John Madera

Notwithstanding its Evil Knievel-style dust jacket—meant perhaps to evoke the titillating, slash-and-burn early lifestyle of its author—the real daredevil pyrotechnics, the true daring and attack, of Barry Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories, are its heavily-machined sentences, prose that may be indebted as much to Hemingway’s brevity, clarity, and macho bravado as they are to O’Connor’s grotesqueries, but still sentences that only Hannah could produce. As he said in a speech delivered at Bennington College in 2002, “I write out of a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of the living.”

Reading through Long, Last, Happy, you can’t help but be struck by Hannah’s attentiveness to life as it’s lived by largely unlikeable characters, lively and unlovely—or perhaps lovely because of their liveliness. His fictional world offers readers a panoply of the grotesque, picturesque, and burlesque, a true variety show of shysters, wastrels, ne’er-do-wells, hacks, and failures; hideous schemers and beautiful dreamers; also musicians, soldiers, writers, and academics, not to mention racists and homophobes, each of whose fabulous foibles are incisively rendered in sentences which, without mincing words, make mincemeat of our hypocrisy, dishonesty, malice, violence, and other assorted failings, what Hannah, in “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb,” describes as that “bog and labyrinth” where we are all “overbrained and overemotioned.” It’s the kind of language, rendered as much with and for the eye as with and for the ear, that struck Hannah “as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores,” a musical language: an “orchestra of the living” accompanying “memory, the whole lying opera of it.”

Speaking of lies, there is no small number of liars in this collection: the “old liars” of “Water Liars,” who trade tall tales like the one about fishermen reeling in “fifty or more white perch big as small pumpkins,” having used “nuthin” for bait, or the “chronic prevaricator” in “High Water Railers,” whose “lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened.” The narrator of “Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?” is a natural-born liar: “There was always a great lie in supposing any life was significant at all, really. And one anointed that lie with a further arrangement into prevarication—that the life had a form and a point.”

Speaking of violence, Long, Last, Happy contains quite the high body count. In “Testimony of Pilot,” a saxophone prodigy’s bandleader is killed in a car wreck; later, when he is well into adulthood, his ex-girlfriend dies in an airplane crash, she and her fellow passengers “all splattered like flesh sparklers over the water just over Cuba.” The story ends with the narrator himself dying on a surgeon’s table. “Coming Close to Donna” ends with a girl getting brained with a tombstone. “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb” opens with the narrator taking “a bullet through the throat” then “overmurder[ing]” a fellow soldier by shooting him four times in the face. The narrator of “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” one of Hannah’s many stories set during the Civil War, confesses that although he hates “this murdering business,” he does love the “burning and the looting.” “Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony” ends with the ultraviolence of a woman being dynamited: “The thing was still alive. It was staggering in the doorway. Its limbs were naked and blackened. Its breasts were scorched black. It was a woman, hair burned away.” Amid all the violence, death, and carnage, Hannah might be describing himself in “Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other”: “He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in his thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in his fictions.” Actually, the protagonist of that story turns out to be a thinly veiled William Burroughs. With all the bullets whizzing past, knives slicing skin, muscle, and tendon, and explosives blasting things to Kingdom Come in Long, Last, Happy, it’s an unlikely weapon, namely “a bowl of Lysol” thrown at a moment of rage, that wreaks the most havoc in the book.

Speaking of sentences, Hannah’s stories are full of stunners that are crafted to conjure a distinct persona, often a crackpot whose scattershot observations shift between the hare-brained and deceptively brainy, at the end of which you can almost hear the requisite rim shot. Some blogorrhea-sufferers, with their swelled heads pricked by all things priapic, will fawn over sentences like “I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out” (“Love Too Long”); and “She wore a sundress with a drastic cleavage up front; looked like something that hung around New Orleans and kneaded your heart to death with her feet” (“Testimony of Pilot”); and “She’d sunbathed herself so her limbs were brown, and her stomach, and the instinct was to rip off the white underwear and lick, suck, say something terrific into the flesh that you discovered” (“Testimony of Pilot”). They will likely get off on the mythologizing of drunkenness: “The drunkard lifts sobriety into a great public virtue in the smug and snakelike heart. It may be his major service. Thus it seemed when I was drunk, raving with bad attitudes” (“Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter”). As funny as these sentences often are, each one carefully attuned to voice and character, these aren’t the ones that shine most. Hannah’s character descriptions are often wonderfully odd and wittily acerbic. These comic observations whittle down the characters that fall prey to Hannah’s blade. But it’s his eccentric lyricism that consistently satisfies, and which, at times, reaches toward an as-thorough-as-Thoreau perspective, one that may be less enlightened, but is by no means less attentive.

Though the largely amoral characters of Hannah’s early work provoke or even celebrate violence and mayhem, later stories like “Scandale d’Estime” begin to soften that stance. This story also attests to his ability to craft quiet lines, such as “Her eyes blinked pink at the rims when she lifted up, and I was gone for her, out of my depth,” or “This charity and long-suffering had never even nearly come near me before.” The assonantal lilt of those short i-sounds in the former sentence and the latter’s alliterative rush of n’s (“never,” “nearly,” and “near”), not to mention its clever interpolations of “near,” the way “never even” suggests a palindrome, attest to Hannah’s command of the full resources of language. And “Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other” is a story replete with idyllic reminiscences characterized by their Faulknerian flow:

The rain smelled sweet, rich. Thinking of the golden wheat lapping it up, breadbasket of the world, amber fields of, sun-browned boy with a string of bullheads, home-dried cut cane pole with black cotton line, drilled piece of corncob for a bobber, Prince Albert tin with nightcrawlers in wet leaves for bait.

Here, Hannah uses b-words (“breadbasket,” “-browned, “boy,” “bullheads,” “black,” “bobber,” and “bait”) to serve as anchors in a lyrical passage that might, because of the glissando effect of its inventory, very well slip off the page. And his eliding of “waves of grain” —allowing the reader to fill in the blanks, as it were—is a masterstroke, as it eliminates the cliché while still enjoying all of its resonance.

The final section of Long, Last, Happy, features four new stories that find Hannah in top form. It opens with “Fire Water,” another of his fishing tales; this one features a group of octogenarian women whose idyllic fishing trip is ruined by an arsonist’s act of conflagration. The story exemplifies many of the hallmarks of Hannah’s style: an unhurried, almost gentle rhythm, evocative imagery, and a sultry lyricism evinced in his descriptions of the fire as “running, almost speaking in snaps of twigs mad orange all suddenly” and a steeple “falling into a heart of black and purple as the whole structure went down, wracking, gnashing what teeth were left.”

Following the collection’s final story, “Rangoon Green,” Hannah posits that “writing train[s] our people for logic, grace, and precision of thought,” and these are the very qualities Hannah’s best writing offers. Story after story reveals compact (if usually skewed) patterns of thinking and speaking that are manifested in sentences that dance, that are elegant even when their subjects are inelegant, that are, yes, graceful even as they stab us. Their precise imagery, description, and characterization; their sharp dialogue, biting humor, and malice; their delight in bizarre human behavior; and their rage against human weakness all confirm not only Hannah’s strange predilections, but also his acute perception and insight. In the 2002 talk he gave at Bennington, Hannah opined:

It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be sleepier than his peers, a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and dream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise.

Without question these stories, home to a carnival of misfits and miscreants, are evidence that even in death Barry Hannah’s work still rises above that of many of his still-living peers—and most especially above the work of his many imitators, the pretenders who, in contrast with Hannah’s ideal writer, seem more dead than alive. As Hannah might have put it, these eyes-wide-open stories “sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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