John McNally
Jefferson Press ($22.95)

by Leah Raven

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia,” E. L. Doctorow once said. John McNally takes full advantage of this acceptability in his book of short stories Ghosts of Chicago. His characters, some purely fictional and others based on late, great Chicagoans such as John Belushi and Gene Siskel, are all moderately to severely unstable. Recurring motifs include men obsessed with women obsessed with other men (who are usually creepy and dysfunctional), mental instability, and drug dependency. Whether rendered in first, second, or third person narration, each of McNally’s voices is clear and evocative, as are the characters. In a few short pages, it becomes evident what haunts each character, even when they themselves aren’t entirely sure.

One of McNally’s most compelling tales is “The Goose,” in which a television show about a goose that thinks it is president of the United States becomes a man’s whole world. The story portrays Chicago television personality Frazier Thomas, but is narrated in the second person; usually limited to guide books and interactive fiction, this device allows the reader to experience how life might have been for a pop-culture figure whom many grew up watching. “The goose waits each morning for the arm that gives him body, the hand that fills his head. Then he waits for you, his trusty compatriot.” Thomas becomes paranoid that the goose is always watching him, and he grows increasingly ill at ease in front of the camera. The directive prose is distant, yet able to convey how sad and adrift Thomas may have felt. “Here you are, a fifty-something-year-old man, surrounded by puppets, and you think, This is my life, it’s not so bad.”

In the more lighthearted “Creature Features,” McNally becomes eight-year-old Timmy, who is obsessed with monsters. When his mother breaks the “horrifying news” that she is pregnant, Timmy doesn’t seem to mind. In reality, the announcement doesn’t even break into his consciousness:

The only things I cared about were monsters. Movie monsters, to be precise. I wouldn’t talk to anyone unless they had something to say about monsters. If the word monster didn’t come up within the first few seconds of a conversation, I quit listening. Monsters was the only acceptable topic—the only topic, in fact, worthy of my undivided attention.

This fact is explored humorously as the pregnancy progresses. Each time the baby is mentioned, Timmy acts oblivious. “What baby?” he replies offhandedly when told he will have to share a room, turning back to his monster magazine. McNally is wholly believable as a preoccupied prepubescent boy. Timmy’s thoughts are simple and curious and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge anything non-monster is very telling of his age. The night his sister is delivered, Timmy connects the birth to the creation of the Frankenstein monster. Only after making this analogy is he able to accept the new addition to his family, shouting out his window into a lightning storm, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

McNally’s seemingly mild-mannered yet unreliable protagonists prove intriguing as each deals with his or her own metaphorical monsters. Far more universal than its title might suggest, Ghosts of Chicago is a rollicking tour through the psyches of our modern world.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Francine Prose
HarperCollins ($24.95)

by Joyce J. Townsend

Instead of unctuous stereotypic babble—the contrived kind that smacks so clearly of an adult author emulating a teen—Francine Prose’s latest book presents a classic young protagonist whose utterly believable point of view unfurls seamlessly. Destined to take its place among the great novels of adolescence, Goldengrove tells of the summer when thirteen-year-old Nico suddenly inherits the role of “One Remaining Child,” cast by mindless fate when her older sister Margaret abruptly dies, and distracted family members navigate the trampled labyrinth of grief.

Any death, particularly that of a young person, plunges survivors into despair; crucial assumptions and expectations—especially that one’s family will live happily ever after—crumble, toppling everything. Margaret’s parents are too shattered to reach beyond their own salvation to shore up their younger daughter’s. Stunned, in total shock, Nico is on her own, with no idea how, or why, to go forward without Margaret:

None of us knew. No one knew. That was what everyone kept saying. First we didn’t know what happened, then we didn’t know how it happened, and then we still couldn’t understand why, why Margaret, why our family, though it wasn’t like us to say, “Why us?” What did it mean to be like us? What did us mean without Margaret?

As Nico struggles for balance, she notes: "Every empty second was an invitation to gaze into the abyss and think how sweet it would feel to jump." Avoiding everything connected with Margaret seems the only way to inch forward with the least amount of pain: “Aaron’s van was way high on the list of Margaret-related things. Everything else—music, films, the lake—slipped down a rung, like guests at a table shifting to make room for a late arrival.” But Aaron, Margaret’s boyfriend, becomes for Nico the only person she can bear to be around. Her parents don’t much care for him, so Nico meets Aaron the way Margaret used to: secretly. “I did what anyone my age would have done. I invented a barbecue with old friends . . . At first I was relieved that [my parents] trusted me, and then insulted that they still thought of me as a truthful child instead of a scheming, secretive teen.”

Initially there is nothing sexual or romantic about the relationship. Nico has had crushes before but “Aaron treated me like a person, unlike the boys in my school, to whom I was a window through which they kept looking for a hotter girl with bigger breasts.” She feels that she can be herself with Aaron, or at least the version of herself that most resembles Margaret. Aaron, for his part, wants Nico to wear Margaret’s clothes and her special scent, so he can do things with her that he used to do with Margaret. “Part of me thought it was creepy . . . And part of me truly loved it,” says Nico, but eventually the creepiness supersedes.

Once again, Francine Prose exposes a universal situation uniquely, this time the struggles of a family and their friends trying to survive the unacceptable. In inimitable fashion, she focuses on the path chosen by the surviving sister who learns, as survivor siblings must, how no one can ever fill the void left by the dead.

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Nahal Tajadod
translated by R. Bononno
The Overlook Press ($26.95)

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative historical novel in English about the life and mind of Jalaluddin Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic who is one of the most widely read poets in North America. Nahal Tajadod confesses that it took her several years to finish this book, during which her mother (a scholar of Persian literature who helped her to understand Rumi) died and Tajadod gave birth to her first child after ten years of trying. During those years, her husband would often inquire about her book on Rumi, and in reply Tajadod would quote from one of Rumi’s own poems: “For a certain time the book has been delayed.” One day, Tajadod writes, while breastfeeding her infant daughter, she opened Rumi’s book and found out that that particular poem continues like this: “Because it takes time for blood to become milk.” Its long gestation seems to have paid off, for Rumi: The Fire of Love is a delight to read.

Rumi was born in 1207 in Balkh (now in Afghanistan), an ancient city in the Persian kingdom whose history is blended with the march of Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and Islamic faiths. His father, Baha Valad, was a Sufi preacher (and indeed, Rumi’s first teacher). Shortly before the Mongols sacked and massacred Balkh, Rumi’s family migrated westward and finally settled in Konya (now in southwest Turkey), an important city in Anatolia then ruled by the Seljuk dynasty. Anatolia was once part of the Byzantine Empire, or Rum in Persian—hence the name “Rumi” for the poet known respectfully to the Persians as Moulana, “our master.” After Baha Valad died, Rumi, then age 24, studied under several teachers and spiritual masters, and ten years later, took over his father’s position as an eminent teacher and scholar in Konya. In 1244, Rumi happened to meet a wandering dervish named Shams (literally meaning sun) in Konya’s bazaar. It was Shams who awakened Rumi to esoteric knowledge, mystic love, and union with God. This was a new beginning for Rumi, who said: “I was dead, behold I became alive. I was a tear, behold I am laughter.”

Rumi treasured spiritual friendships and “dialogues” (a tradition known as sohbat in Sufism); Shams was his first brother in soul. After Shams left Konya in 1248 (or was killed by Rumi’s jealous students, as another theory goes), Rumi found another friend to speak with, Salah Zarkub (“goldsmith” by profession), between 1248 and 1258, and finally Hesam Chalabi, from 1258 until Rumi’s death in 1273. Rumi: The Fire of Love is thus divided into three parts: Shams, Salah, and Hesam. Although Rumi’s contact with Shams was relatively short-lived (less than four years), more than half of the book is devoted to the Shams period, not only because Tajadod has squeezed the first three decades of Rumi’s life into this part, but also because of the overwhelming impact of Shams on the last four decades of Rumi’s life. Rumi is well-known as the originator of whirling dervishes (a Sufi order which Rumi’s son Sultan Valad actually organized, not Rumi himself). But how did Rumi discover whirling dance as a spiritual practice? A 1998 documentary film, Rumi: Poet of the Heart, informs us that Rumi turned to whirling after Shams had left him and while Rumi was longing for his spiritual friend. But Tajadod’s research suggests that Shams actually taught Rumi the practice of whirling dance.

Tajadod portrays Rumi not merely as a Sufi master, but as an embodiment of ancient spiritual wisdom absorbed from Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Greek, Persian, and Indian traditions. The book ends with Rumi’s death on a Sunday in Konya (where his tomb has been a shrine for centuries); his funeral was attended by people of various faiths, ethnicities, and languages. Another significant aspect of the novel is that Tajadod knows Persian, Rumi’s language, and has thus used original sources to write this story. These sources include Rumi’s own works: Diwan shams (“Book of Poetry dedicated to Shams”), Masnawi ma’nawi (Rhymed couplets on spiritual matters), and Fihi ma fihi (Discourses), as well as the extant books of Shams’s Discourses (Maqalat shams), "The Book of Sultan Valad" (Valad namah), and a huge volume, Manaqeb al-arefin (“The Virtuous Acts of Mystics”), written by Rumi’s disciple Ahamd Aflaki after his master’s death.

Tajadod, who was born in Tehran and has lived in France over the past three decades, holds a Ph D in oriental literature and is a scholar at the French National Research Center. Her husband, the acclaimed French screenwriter Jean Claude Carrière, is currently working on a film version of the novel; one can only hope that the film is as vivid and accurate as the book.

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Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25)

by Jill Stegman

Told through the eyes of a middle-aged spinster named Glory Boughton, Marilynne Robinson’s Home is a challenging story played out in a Midwestern kitchen, involving heavy doses of theological discourse. However, while the scenes all take place in the kitchen and area surrounding the Boughton residence in Iowa, Home is anything but a domestic drama. As in real family life, all the tension lies beneath the surface, where expectations and stubborn refusal to change can lead to despair.

Robinson introduced the characters of the Boughton family in her previous novel, Gilead, which focused on the elderly Reverend Ames and his reminiscences told to his young son. Meditative in tone, Gilead charts the history of the town and Ames’s position in it. The characters of the Boughton family lurk in the background, introduced, but not completely realized.

In Home, the story of the tangled family of Ames’s best friend and fellow reverend, Robert Boughton, emerges from the tangential threads of Gilead. Filled with despondency over a failed love affair, Glory Boughton has come home to Gilead to care for her ailing father. The tedium of her life is alleviated by the appearance of her brother, Jack, who returns after a twenty-year absence, ostensibly to assist the family and make amends to his father. After a somewhat abrupt departure from home following the birth of his illegitimate child, Jack has been incommunicado all this time, not even appearing for his mother’s funeral.

Robinson’s characters represent archetypes; Jack and Robert Boughton, for example, play out the universal Oedipal conflict between returning prodigal son and demanding father. This is a common theme in literature, but Robinson succeeds in digging beneath the surface to reveal the historical reasons why different generations can fail to connect. Events are played out in the early 1960s, when segregation was the status quo and most Americans were intolerant of anything that challenged authority. Reverend Boughton’s frequent recitations of Christian tracts and the religious underpinning of the family are awesome in their depth and cerebral intensity, yet ultimately hypocritical. Although his theology is grounded in the enlightened thinking of Transcendentalists and their abolitionist beliefs, Boughton observes the beating of civil rights demonstrators with indifference. He even argues with Jack that civil disobedience is wrong. Jack seems mesmerized by the events, and we later learn why he might have so much emotional investment.

While the obvious protagonist may be Jack, it is ultimately Glory who emerges from the sidelines, providing the emotional resonance that allows us to comprehend this sad story; her faith and love prevent the tone from becoming overly morbid. Glory observes the interactions between her father and brother without judging either. She sees the tragedy unfolding, but can do nothing to stop it. Although she weeps throughout the book, she does not appear pathetic; as Robinson simply writes, “She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family.”

Glory is as complex as her father and brother, making her the perfect observer of the events that unfold. She simply applies the principles of her upbringing to the task: “Glory’s view of things had an authority for them precisely because it was naïve.” Glory also serves brilliantly as a lens on this world because she suffers from rampant male arrogance and sexism: “She seemed always to have known that, to their father’s mind, the world’s great work was the business of men . . . They were the stewards of ultimate things. Women were creatures of second rank, however pious, however beloved, however honored.” Like women before her, Glory puts her personal disappointment aside for the sake of her father and brother. Still, Robinson makes evident the depths of her hurt at not being regarded as importantly as her male kin: “None of this had mattered much through all the years of her studies and teaching, but now, in the middle of any night, it was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness.”

It would seem that the novel is headed toward a grim conclusion: both father and son want the other to change, and when it does not happen, it leads to the end of the relationship. It is up to Glory to make sense of the shambles. As her father becomes frailer, Glory must also witness Jack’s withdrawal and final exit from home. Realizing that she will probably never see Jack again, she understands that she will most likely remain in Gilead for the rest of her life, accepting a largely unfulfilled existence. However, Glory does not despair; she sees herself as a conduit through which the positive characteristics of the Boughton clan will pass, promising Jack that she will keep the Boughton home intact for the rest of the family. Finally, it is Glory who patiently looks for optimism in the next generation when, after meeting Jack’s biracial son, she imagines him returning to a changed Gilead as an adult and thinks, “He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

José Eduardo Agualusa
translated by Daniel Hahn
Arcadia Books (£11.99)

by Jeff Bursey

José Eduardo Agualusa’s previous novel, The Book of Chameleons, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, featured a small cast of Angolans who purchased false histories to give themselves distance from their roles in Angola’s civil war (1975–2002), while the narrator, formerly a man, had come back to life as a gecko. Forgery, resurrection, and history were Agualusa’s concerns; he devised a lyrical voice for the gecko that drew the reader into an engagement with what decades of strife had created. In My Father’s Wives a missing father is used as a base from which to explore Angolan and personal identity. Here, Agualusa has deepened and expanded his concerns. The result is a novel that is profound and enriching.

The narrator, Sidónio, is a novelist accompanying his wife, Karen Boswall, a documentary filmmaker specializing in African women’s issues, as they visit various people and countries. Alongside this activity is the story Sidónio invents of Laurentina, also a documentary maker, in search of her real parents: a woman named Alima, and the acclaimed musician Faustino Manso. In the company of her lover, Mandume, Laurentina leaves Portugal for Angola, where she meets half-siblings; she tours South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique looking up her father’s lovers. What begins in confusion becomes more tangled with each page. Some incidents that occur in the Sidónio-Boswall chapters show up transformed in the Laurentina story. On both levels there is a constant emphasis on the importance of race, Angolan history, and storytelling—in this case, literature and music—for major and minor characters.

The many literary figures referred to in My Father’s Wives, part of the world of letters that Agualusa belongs to, cohere as a verisimilitudinous prop, but the writings of Mia Couto, Ana Paula Tavares, Rui Knopfli, and others are quoted or referred to by characters on both levels, inviting the reader to ask: what is false here, and what is true? In a work where Laurentina’s quest for parents is the prime motivation on the story level, and where Boswall seeks the facts, or poetic truth (although most documentarians make films charged with subjectivity), in a context where identity is fragile, fleeting, and exchangeable, the presence of real African poets, as well as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuścínski (who wrote about the Angolan civil war in his 1976 book Another Day of Life), unite to make us wary of what we hold in our hands. It’s a contradiction that helps prevent complacency in the reader. Some novels are welcoming; this one urges us to interrogate its genesis and content.

Agualusa is keenly interested in the question of race, especially when twinned with nationality. Mandume, born in Portugal, rejects his Angolan heritage thanks to the example of his father, whose two brothers were killed in Luanda. Laurentina regards herself as “a good Portuguese woman” who feels “a little bit Indian,” and who visits Angola to “find out whether there’s anything in me that’s African.” Her half brother Bartolomeu grew up in Angola and has strong views on how people regard Africans. Talking to one of Faustino’s lovers, Seretha du Toit, he states:

And how were all the big fortunes made in the United States of America? In Brazil? The whites killed the Indians, robbed and skinned them, and now their grandchildren are respectable people. All the whites in Australia descend from thieves and prostitutes. If that happened in those countries, why wouldn’t it happen in ours? . . .

To a lot of Europeans the only good black man is a poor black man. They don’t accept that a black man can be rich. First they attack us [Angola] for having allied ourselves with the socialist bloc. Now they attack us for being good capitalists . . .

Du Toit’s reply devastates him: “Accepting that you can’t criticize someone because that someone is black, that’s called paternalism. Paternalism is the elegant racism of cowards.” A way to sidestep the race question, or replace it with something else, is offered in the form of Miss Kiu-Kiu, “daughter of a Chinese man and black woman, who married an Arab and had five children. One of the daughters married an Indian, the others mulattos, etc., in an example of multiculturalism . . . ” One minor character’s wife, a mestiça, gets “herself classified as white” after apartheid gets going, reverting to mestiça once it’s more advantageous. Evidently, labels based on color are misleading. “Race” is insufficiently nuanced to explain or capture such complex situations, and, according to the novel’s sensibilities, it provides an illusory identity; while it’s nothing to bank on, race must be struggled with every day.

Agualusa’s third crucial theme is Angolan history. The civil war, its legacy, vendettas, and cruelties ensnare everyone. Many characters have led mysterious or grim lives, and once openly warring countries are still pitted against each other, sometimes within the same skin. “On some days [Brand Malan] wakes up Angolan. On others, white South African. On others still he wakes up Angolan and white South African and Boer, all at the same time, and then, right, then it’s best to keep your distance.” When on duty, the Angolan border guards drink and like to play draughts, in contrast to the professionalism of the Namibian guards. Mandume learns he has one remaining uncle whom his father never mentioned because they were on opposite sides in the war. The damage done to children is ever present; it’s not precisely history because the battles are not yet over.

Once again, Agualusa has breathed novelistic life into history. A wry humor keeps My Father’s Wives from being ponderous, its themes are treated with sharpness and intelligence, and the multiple narrators keep the diverse plots moving forward. The characters embody the bewilderment, contradictions, rootlessness, and sense of loss that come from a generation that survived, though didn’t escape, the ravages of civil war.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Deb Olin Unferth
McSweeney’s ($22)

by Stephanie Hlywak

At the heart of Deb Olin Unferth’s astonishing, unsettling first novel is the idea and intention of vacation: what do we escape from? Where do we go? And at what point do we transition from being happy that we’re away to wanting to return back home? “A vacation,” Unferth writes, “is simply, you know, to vacate.” The characters who inhabit her sparse and melancholic landscape have indeed vacated, but they are not vacant: cast in a poignant, deceptively minimalist style, they are fully formed emotional beings craving reassurance they are not alone in the world. Their journeys—a man seeking the object of his wife’s fantasies, a daughter searching for the father she never knew existed, a refugee returning home to family, a dolphin “un-trainer” releasing dolphins back into the ocean—shape their characters.

Beautifully structured, with paragraphs like alternating verses in a folk song duet and a multi-perspective narrative—nine voices in all, including that of a “Sexy woman in bikini”—Vacation centers around Myers, a man with a misshapen head, who, suspecting his wife has strayed, begins stalking her, only to discover she is following another man, Gray, a stranger to her but an old acquaintance of Meyers’s from college. Meyers follows Gray from New York City to Syracuse to Nicaragua, orbiting around him without ever making contact, seeking without ever finding. Gray, meanwhile, suffering from a massive brain tumor that impairs his judgment, is in Panama, unable to find his way home. This wonderful synchronicity—two men with head problems and domestic trouble—is emblematic of the deft reciprocity that unites these characters, who otherwise move through Unferth’s spectral landscape alone and disembodied.

In a 2007 interview, Unferth stated that she had to write this novel or she would die. This imperative to act—even in ways that are not necessarily rational, as if propelled by a force greater than oneself—is reflected in the characters that populate Vacation: they, too, have to keep moving forward, even if in the end it hastens, as opposed to guards them from, their own demise.

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Roberto Bolaño
translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions ($23.98)

by Luke Sykora

Since the author’s untimely death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño has risen to a level of international prominence. Nazi Literature in the Americas is one of his most innovative works, as it charts the lives of 33 writers from the Western Hemisphere, all of whom are completely invented. As Bolaño’s deadpan satire carves its way through the imagined lives of these extremist authors, we’re introduced to a surprisingly varied body of creative work: monumental avant-garde experiments, bizarre Nazi science fiction efforts, embarrassingly sentimental lyrics, and the unabashed soccer hooliganism of the Fabulous Schiaffino Boys.

Bolaño’s subjects are for the most part absurdly minor literary figures, producing their poems and novels with little awareness of their almost total irrelevance to the larger literary society around them. Oddly, the effects such extreme political commitments have on these authors’ works are curious at best—their politics sometimes hover in the background and at other times emerge in completely inscrutable ways. As an example, consider Franz Zwickau’s poem “Concentration Camp,” described as “a humorous and at times touching story of Zwickau’s life as a child, between the ages of five and ten, in a middle-class neighborhood in Caracas.” In many cases these Nazi authors are near buffoons, textbook studies in the banality of evil.

Historical figures—both artists and politicians—regularly make cameos in the lives of Bolaño’s imagined authors. Jim O’Bannon, a beat poet and football player from Georgia, apparently unaware of the movement’s sexual politics, attacks Allen Ginsberg after Ginsberg and another man make advances toward him. Rory Long, a disillusioned disciple of Charles Olson, vomits for three hours after reading The Maximus Poems. Meanwhile, the lives of the South American poets are often deeply intertwined with the repressive dictatorships of Perón and Pinochet.

It’s a testament to Bolaño’s skillful prose and vivid characters that his parade of microbiographies stays fresh throughout. But is his dark, potentially inflammatory comedy aiming for anything beyond well-wrought farce? In the final biography, that of artist and murderer Carlos Ramírez Hoffman, we’re at least given a hint. The story is narrated by a Bolaño who, much like the autobiographical Bolaño (though not necessarily the historical Bolaño, as a recent piece by the New York Times suggests), was briefly incarcerated in a Chilean prison following Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Bolaño is hired to track Ramirez Hoffman and eventually comes across him in a dingy bar in Spain. As it becomes clear to Bolaño that the man who hired him intends to kill Ramirez Hoffman, he half-heartedly attempts to intervene on behalf of the poet/murderer: “He can’t hurt anyone now, I said. But I didn’t really believe it. Of course he could. We all could.”

Bolaño’s reaction to the presumed revenge killing ends here. He’s too smart to overreach himself and try to resolve any nagging questions we might have about the role of politics in art or to indulge in any heroic fantasies about the writer’s role in history. If anything, Bolaño seems to be saying, political heroics can get a writer into deep trouble, sometimes yielding results much more dangerous than bad art. Beyond this suggestion, Bolaño sidesteps any overtures toward a grand moral lesson. In fact, by entering the story as a character in a fiction of his own making, Bolaño turns the dilemma on its head: it is no longer a question of how art can “influence” the real world, but how the real world can be drawn into the imagination—and how the imagination can process, rearrange, lampoon, and sometimes defuse the residue left behind by very real upheaval and displacement.

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FINAL SILENCE
Ronald Flores
translated by Gavin O’Toole
Aflame Books ($15.95)

SENSELESSNESS
Horacio Castellanos Moya
translated by Katherine Silver
New Directions ($15.95)

by Aaron Shulman

How does one write about terror in fiction? Until September 11th, 2001, this wasn’t a pressing question for writers exploring contemporary life in the United States; now it is unavoidable. The last seven years have seen numerous fictions grappling with 9/11, to varying degrees of success. The consensus has been that the experience is still too close and the nerves still too jangled to process it. While Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland turned many a head last year, and Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II was chillingly prescient, it is undeniable that writers in the U.S. are just starting to experiment at refashioning terror into illuminating products of the imagination. It seems only natural, then, to look for guidance and inspiration in the literature of regions long acquainted with the daily intimacies of fear and violence. Guatemala is a devastatingly fertile place to begin.

Guatemala’s civil war—the longest in Latin American history, a brutal conflict that took the lives of over 200,000 people—lasted from 1960 to 1996. Terrorism against civilians was the modus operandi of successive military regimes in Guatemala, and heinous human rights violations were part and parcel of the government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Extrajudicial “death squads” became an inextricable component of the violence (thanks to a helping hand from the U.S.); the use of the word desaparecer (disappear) as a transitive verb originated in Guatemala. It should come as no surprise, then, that the milieu of the civil war has defined contemporary Guatemalan literature. Though much of this writing has yet to be translated into English, a few important titles are now available, including Guatemalan novelist Ronald Flores’s absorbing first novel, Final Silence, published in Spanish in 2001 but released in English just last year.

Winner of the Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, Final Silence takes place during the time leading up to the signing of the 1996 peace accords. The plot concerns a Guatemalan psychotherapist, Ernesto Sandoval, who fled his mother country many years earlier to live in the U.S., where he has established himself professionally and founded a center dedicated to treating torture victims. Haunted by memories of his homeland and the deaths of his father and brother, Sandoval returns to Guatemala to rediscover himself and his native country. Once there, he begins treating a powerful general and war criminal, Jorge Camacho, who longs to be set free from the darkness of his misdeeds during the civil war. The two men embark on a psychological battle toward redemption or disaster, each repulsed by, yet also drawn to, the other.

Drawing on an intriguingly diverse repertoire of narrative techniques—viewpoints constantly shift, for example, and first-, second-, and third-person narrations can all be found interacting in the space of a few pages—Flores shows that formal innovation is an effective, perhaps even necessary strategy for taking on content whose horror can’t be conveyed in words. His decision to center Final Silence’s exploration of the aftereffects of terror around the pain of the victimizer is a daring move, one which demonstrates Flores’s courage and imagination. While one could securely argue that Final Silence explores the poetics of terror, one might also frame it as an unsentimental gambit into the complicated poetics of healing. For Flores, healing is not a process of rosy restoration; rather, the afterglow of fear and violence persists as victim and victimizer must grapple with the past, much like Sandoval and Camacho do in their tumultuous sessions (this approach could be projected in any number of ways onto the U.S. reaction to 9/11). The ongoing story of Guatemala is one still plagued by terror, yet it is bracing to know that the tormented isthmian gem has found an able chronicler.

Another recently translated novel bringing the plight of Guatemala to English-speaking readers is Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Born in Honduras, Castellanos Moya grew up in El Salvador and came of age during that nation’s very own terror-filled civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992. In 1997 he published El Asco, a novel which garnered both praise and death threats, sending him into exile and eventually landing him in Guatemala (he is now the exiled writer-in-residence at the nonprofit organization City of Asylum in Pittsburgh). Out of this sojourn in Guatemala emerged Senselessness, a slim, compulsively readable novel which is as harrowing as it is hilarious.

The unnamed narrator of Senselessness is a paranoid, misanthropic litterateur who has been hired by the archbishop of Guatemala to copyedit a 1,100-word truth report chronicling atrocities committed by the military during the civil war (Castellanos Moya never makes it explicit that the story takes place in Guatemala, but various hints in the text put it beyond question). The impending publication of the report has brought tensions between the church and the military to a head, and the narrator fears for his safety. As a drinking buddy says to him one day at a cantina near the archbishop’s palace: “May you come out of this shit alive.’”

While the novel confronts the unthinkable atrocities committed against indigenous communities and, much like Final Silence, the legacy of this violence, Senselessness still manages to be uproariously funny. This is no meager feat, and its success hinges on the acerbically comic, darkly spitting voice of the narrator. Castellanos Moya’s style here might best be described as a breathlessly looping rant, which leads the reader into winding, page-long sentences and multipage paragraphs. The narrator’s voice is equally entertaining whether it’s following a thread of his unraveling paranoia or, as in this passage, recounting the unglamorous details of a sexual conquest: “thoroughly excited by my member in her mouth, [she] finished taking off the garments she was still wearing, including a pair of military boots and thick socks that seemed to me vulgar and unattractive garments to wear under a summer skirt . . . when an odor issued forth from those military boots that tore my nasal passages to pieces and made me feel the strongest possible revulsion, an odor that undoubtedly permeated her feet, perhaps beautiful and appetizing from afar, but which I didn’t even dare to look at because I had thrown my head back against the couch, my eyes closed, my face wearing the enthralled expression of a man overwhelmed by pleasure.” Translator Katherine Silver must be commended for her artful fortitude in sustaining the rhythmic energy of the prose.

Parallel to the narrator’s screwy misadventures and mounting fear is his fascination with the testimonies of the massacre survivors and torture victims recorded in the report he is editing. Phrases like “I am not complete in the mind,” describing the psychological trauma of violence, echo over and over in the narrator’s mind. As the novel veers toward its conclusion, the gap between violence in testimony and impending violence against the narrator seeming to close, these phrases take on an even greater power, fusing into the language of the narrative itself. It is in fusions like this one where Senselessness is most boldly triumphant, forging together comedy and tragedy, laughter and despair, history and the present.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Phillip Lopate
Other Press ($24.95)

by Joseph Jon Lanthier

It’s typically a sign of desperation when writers, even critics, begin littering their work with deferential references to their influences. Susan Sontag dismissed this tendency—an occasional indulgence in her early pieces—as inflated didacticism. “My pedagogical impulse got in the way of my prose. All those lists, recommendations!” Nevertheless, the essayist’s relationship to the reader has a far more instructive flavor than, say, that of the novelist. Indeed, to assume this posture in fiction is to risk lecturing a story rather than telling it.

Phillip Lopate, a master of the contemporary essay, may be one exception. In his two novels, and now two subsequent novellas, the most genuine moments often involve some deft name-dropping: a tenuous lover’s rendezvous over Kenji Mizoguchi’s films, or a devastating dispute over the classical conductor Zubin Mehta and composer Pierre Boulez. The effect is calmly centrifugal; Lopate is the rickety but charming interborough bus leading us from the seed of his idea to the fruits of his cultural exploration, rather than vice versa.

One is tempted to link this distinctive style not only to Lopate’s day job as an editor and writing professor, but to his long bachelorhood. Alienated admiration, of women just as often as of film or literature, is his most fecund subject; he finds eloquence between passion and detachment. Since marrying in the ’90s, however, he has been on his best behavior, mostly publishing anthologies that emphasize his curiosity for cultural bridges rather than sexual ones. But the novellas in Two Marriages show that the “inescapable ego” of the essayist makes eternal islands (bachelors) of us all. There’s a dashing intellectual promiscuity in Lopate’s best work that he has not surrendered entirely to matrimony.

It is fitting, then, that both novellas in Two Marriages concern a spontaneous overflow of betrayal, recollected—and confessed—in tranquility. Lopate uses perfidy as an excuse to explore the “universal hetero-male problem”: viewing our lovers from across the sex crevasse, we become infatuated with the distance rather than the destination. This central theme is also readily understood as a surreptitious conversation about criticism. Just as we create, and become obsessed with, methods and systems for organizing film genres or schools of poetics, we impose upon unthinkable events and deeds the same ultimately futile theoretical structures. And why not? Human behavior can be just as prone to dusty archetype as a Dreyer film.

Of course, it’s one thing to comment on a movie as a spectator (a role we have no option but to assume) and quite another to withdraw analytically from one’s own romantic meltdown. And, granted, the “Woman as Other” theme is no innovative twist. To exacerbate matters, both of the couples in Two Marriages teeter on the precipice of stereotype: jaundiced, domineering husbands with wives who furtively exercise the seductive, cognitive strength of puissance that by now seems the birthright of fictional femininity. But Lopate eschews the pedestrian by setting his stories after the heat of the moment, in the flaccid rationalizations that follow cuckolding and in the slow return to the drudgery of household discourse.

These scenarios are spun for humor in “The Stoic’s Marriage,” the first of the two novellas. This work is a bolder mirror image of Lopate’s first novel, Confessions of Summer: both are sustained first-person monologues of disaster, both are moody and esoteric, and both deteriorate in a fugue of an anticlimax. Gordon, the narrator and titular stoic, is nearly a hyperbolic version of Lopate’s on-page persona: a wealthy, bookish, middle-aged sesquipedalian lacking modern social skills. He catalogs via Moleskin diary the story of his hasty marriage to a seemingly nubile Filipino woman named Rita, whom he meets as she cares for his dear mother on her deathbed. This is domestic mismatch as Rabelaisian satire; it’s not enough that man can never “know” woman, but Lopate presents us with characters that quite literally do not know each other (a third-world trophy bride and an overgrown, under-sexed, perpetual graduate student). The narrator attempts to justify his rashness in love with poetic sophisms, hilariously dissecting his wife’s body, or at least attempting to, in page after page. “She lifts her head like a doe, and as you approach her, you see one eye, not both. I am speaking metaphorically, of course . . . . I don’t know how to explain it any better, forgive me.”

Gordon’s determination to follow the philosopher Epictetus’s example molds him into a sublime foil for the bubble of activity he is thrust into. Rita’s betrayal, which is a convoluted series of unfortunate circumstances rather than a single cataclysmic event, forms a stoic fantasy; the more ludicrously brutal the situation becomes, the more opportunities the protagonist has to react calmly and recite Seneca. When faced with the annoyance of celibacy, the desire for sex is marginalized with logical subterfuge: “It is not that sex is overrated, but that its pleasures are inherently the same thing over and over . . . . It is not even necessary to masturbate.” This is a funnier interpretation of the thinking man’s sexual sour grapes than even White and Thurber’s.

Through Gordon we also see Lopate in rare form, participating in clear Jewish comic traditions. Although Gordon himself is not Jewish (he makes vague boasts of his Spanish heritage), his situation recalls the story of Job—a story that, when viewed aerially, is one of the most hilariously acerbic Jewish satires ever written, and quite possibly the prototype for all humor of the pathetic. Gordon is an even better clown than Job because he phrases all of his lamentations as failed stoic aphorisms laced with melodramatic pathos (a choice example: “I realize that Rita probably doesn’t love me as much as I love her, but it doesn’t matter . . . The fact that I love her more than she does me is justified, because I’m not as lovable as she is.”). And because Gordon is the victim of Woman rather than God, we find his plight both identifiable and deserved (the nimble gift of the best clowns). Gordon, like Job, admits defeat before a higher authority—performing a graceful vaudevillian tumble while he’s at it.

The second marriage/novella, “Eleanor,” changes pace to the free-indirect discourse style of The Rug Merchant (the two marriages are thus neatly “buddied” with Lopate’s prior fictive output). A single weekend in the upper-class lives of middle-aged Frank and his second wife, Eleanor, is recounted through multiple and occasionally colorful points of view. We’re fed a series of lively if somewhat perfunctory vignettes around the household: people answer phones, visit zoos, become jealous, escape to bedrooms to make sexual advances, chide one another, make love, and seem pleasantly ignorant of their decadent insularity. The highlight of this slight farce is a dinner party featuring a locally famous actor and several old friends; Lopate keeps his omniscient narration at a Renoirian wide angle throughout while various voices and scenes bleed through it. But perhaps because of the broadening of vocal diversity and the simultaneous whittling of temporal scope (not to mention the sharp departure from the “Stoic’s” clownishness), the second marriage feels less successful.

Lopate also grapples here with the universal male problem he means to hunt down: standing on the divide’s other end, he fails to penetrate (or perhaps penetrates too much) the minds of his female characters in a manner that transcends typical gender projections. But then again, it’s this same bias that makes the confused-male-fantasia aspect of the marriage so credible. We delve headfirst into Frank’s (mis)understanding of his wife’s body: “he felt that peculiar secretion of hers, like an acid bath, gripping him gently, which always excited him.” Gender confusion is rooted in the genitals; the mystery of the female otherness, the yonic symbol, becomes corrosive. We eavesdrop on these fumbling interactions as Frank’s id pitifully misinterprets his lover’s signals: “It was hard to tell at this stage in their marriage where her appetites left off and his began.” It’s too soon after courtship for Eleanor to risk bruising Frank’s ego, so she allows herself to become a mirror for her husband’s lust.

This leads to the inevitable set piece of Eleanor’s admission of betrayal, and the loudest female cliché in Lopate’s oeuvre. “Sometimes I would sleep with a man and get the feeling that underneath he loathed me. Loathed my body, because it was a woman’s body.” Must all sexual misconceptions be rooted in misogyny, equated with male assault? We suspect in such passages that, underneath it all, our essayist is hopelessly glib; the problems of these husbands can be clumsily tagged as love vs. lust, selfishness vs. compassion, tribalism vs. modernity.

But with Lopate the accomplishment is not always in the structures he builds; it’s on the bridges that depart from them. Through allusive girders and beams in the text we glimpse the overspilling blueprints and roadmaps of the author’s own cultural-sexual obsessions. Roughly two-thirds into “Eleanor,” Frank plays his guests a 16 mm copy of City Lights through an old projector, and we’re treated to a laconic narration of the film’s final reel, climaxing with “the most heartbreaking close-up in film history.” As the scene fades, Frank mistily observes that the ending “gets” everyone who watches it, quite unaware of what he might learn from Chaplin. This recalls an anecdotal tangent in one of Lopate’s personal/film essays in which he describes watching Dreyer’s Ordet with a Catholic girlfriend; she scolds him for the double standard of refusing religion but allowing himself to be moved to tears by Judeo-Christian imagery on the screen. “You can take it in art, but you can’t take it in life!” she reprimands.

Lopate’s characters are like us; they want—they need—to solve problems by talking them out. But City Lights presents a perplexing alternative: when the female lead “sees” the chivalric Tramp for the first time, and he peers back into her, their interlocking visual epiphanies leap the chasm of gender confusion. This humanistic recognition from island to island is delectably ironic in Two Marriages, but it nearly sinks Lopate’s entire city at the same time. It’s never an endless intellectual exchange that soothes sexual alienation: it’s always the hackneyed melodrama of romantic tenderness. Which might be, in the end, the real problem. We can take it in art, but we can’t take it in life.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009

Geoff Ryman
Small Beer Press ($16)

by Margaret Shaklee

“The words will come again, when your people need them most. When they cry out, tormented and disrespected, this book will flourish to shade them from the sun.”
—Leaf 155, Kraing Meas

In The King’s Last Song, noted speculative fiction author Geoff Ryman weaves together ancient legend with a gritty view of modern Cambodian life, and the pattern that emerges is surprising. The novel conveys not merely a story, but the light and darkness, despair and hope, tradition and Westernization that is Cambodia itself.

Jayavarman VII, the beloved legendary Buddhist king of Cambodia, has never been needed more. The government is in corrupt shambles, no one knows who can be trusted, and continuity from day to day cannot be taken for granted. When archeologist Luc Andrade’s team unearths the Kraing Meas, the golden book written by Jayavarman himself, it is not particularly a comfort but a worry. A target for art thieves and any number of factions with questionable motives, the book is a historical treasure that endangers anyone near it. When Luc, along with the book, is kidnapped, two of his employees are forced to team up if they want a chance at finding him. William is a peaceful “motoboy” who wants nothing more than to support his family. Tan Map, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier whose family has long since been killed, doesn’t know how to live without war.

As Luc tries to keep himself and his fellow prisoner alive, he begins to translate the Kraing Meas for his captor, who turns out to be an official in the Pol Pot regime. Interspersed with the present-day action, the tale of Jayavarman unfolds: In his childhood he was called Prince Nia, or Prince Hereditary Slave. He continually tried to break down the barriers between nobles and the slaves and workers. He spent his adult life caught between worlds and trying to unite them. In one world, he was a slave captured in war, surviving only by the love he had for Fishing Cat, his childhood slave-friend. In the other, he was a king, married to a compassionate noblewoman, but with a slave consort. As a ruler he used love, not fear, to lead, but he also arranged for a troublesome son to be killed in battle. He was love and war, devotion and brutality.

While peaceful William, war-consumed Map, and Cambodia-loving Luc could easily be flat, typecast characters, Ryman steers clear of such simplifications. Their interwoven histories are at times noble and at times horrifying, laced with profound emotions and punctuated with atrocities. The King’s Last Song leaves one questioning preconceptions of good and evil, and conflicted between hope for and discouragement with the human race.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2008/2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008/2009