Mandarins

By Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Translated by Charles De Wolf; Archipelago Books, 2007)

Everyone knows the name of the man who made Rashomon. But no one knows the name of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Japanese literary legend responsible for the stories on which Akira Kurosawa based his film. Reading Mandarins, a new collection of fifteen Akutagawa stories translated by Charles De Wolf, will make you wonder why he's not as well known as Mishima and Kawabata. He writes with melancholy, passion, tenderness, and irony of a country and its people making the transition to modernity; his elegant prose never buckles, even under the more melodramatic moments. “I must say that I have grown weary of all that is called modern enlightenment,” a character says, and Akutagawa himself, who committed suicide in 1927 at the age of 35, wasn’t convinced that the new Japan was better than the old one. His men hold out for love only to be cuckolded, his women sacrifice their talent to familial love, and even the landscape suffers—a family’s once-grand garden withers from neglect while they chase after money. The stories, some of which are based on the classical Japanese folk tales Akutagawa loved, bring to mind the Russians he also revered, but with that fatalism relieved by a capacity to be consoled by the world’s occasional, accidental beauty: a moon whitewashing a river at night, a young woman tossing an armful of oranges to her brothers from a train.

That last image comes from the title story, which turns on it, and which I regret mentioning in the way I might regret giving away what happened this season on The Wire. We’re very, very enlightened now, but hardly any writer working today could make you feel that in describing a visual detail you’ve spoiled a plot twist. Or would cede narrative power to the pleasure taken in beauty—pleasure unapologized for, and unadorned by sentiment.

Carlene Bauer has written for Salon, The New York Times, and n+1.

Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

By Dorothy Gilman (Ballantine Books, 1983)

The Mrs. Pollifax series belongs to a subgenre of mysteries called cozies, which are the G-rated reads of the crime world. Cozies are often set in small towns and there is little graphic sex or violence. People die, but there isn’t much grief; no one close to the protagonist ever seems to die. The protagonist is usually a female amateur detective who relies on her nosy demeanor to solve the crime. There is sometimes a kitschy hook that ties the series together, be it knitting, crossword puzzles, crime-solving pets, whatever. You know a cozy from other mysteries because you’re not afraid or disturbed while you’re reading it and because the reading experience is, well, cozy.

Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station is the sixth in the Mrs. Pollifax series, a lovable cozy that centers on a grandmother in New Jersey who joins the CIA. Though as a spy in her sixties she meets with a lot of skepticism from the undercover community, she plays the part of the harmless and bumbling tourist perfectly, which makes her invaluable on her missions abroad. She remains dignified and unruffled under interrogation, and eventually becomes quite skilled at karate. She never compromises her commitment to gardening, so the neighbors never suspect a thing.

In China Station, Mrs. Pollifax must go to China and bust Mr. X, a man with sensitive information, out of an isolated labor camp. To allay suspicions, the CIA signs her on with an American tour group. There is another CIA operative in the group who will only reveal himself (or herself) to Mrs. Pollifax after she’s made contact with an intermediary. In the meantime, Mrs. Pollifax and the reader try to guess which of the six other Americans on tour is the secret operative.

The plot thickens when Mrs. Pollifax suspects that her bags have been searched and that she’s been followed on a secret nightly reconnaissance outing. This being a Cold War-era book, the Soviets are trying to get to Mr. X before the Americans do -- could they have planted an operative in the tour group as well? Mrs. Pollifax navigates this dangerous terrain with her trademark decorum and charm.

I’ll admit that in the past I’ve scoffed at some cozy conventions: titles like Murder with Plankton or plots in which the cat solves the crime. But China Station has fine writing that will satisfy those who appreciate sharp turns of phrases and descriptions. Mrs. Pollifax has the wisdom and presumption that come with age and Gilman gives the narrative voice a wry humor. True to cozy form, the tension doesn’t get too high and the characters are never in white-knuckle danger. But the plot is clever with some surprising twists, and overall, the read is delightful.

Cameron McClure is a literary agent and amateur bike mechanic.

Reader’s Block

By David Markson (Dalkey Archive, 1996; reissue, 2007)

David Markson’s 1996 novel Reader’s Block concerns a writer called Reader who plots a novel about a character called Protagonist and, by the by, sketches this novel, the one that the lower-case reader—you, me—reads. It’s less confusing than it sounds, and more emotionally gripping than tangled issues of authorship tend be. It also takes up precious little space on the page. The book consists mostly of snippets concerning artists and writers—facts about them, quotes by them. These fragments tilt toward the truly depressing. That Reader ponders this flotsam, rather than writing his novel, constitutes his block. The first snippet: “Church bells were already ringing, to announce the Armistice in November 1918, when word reached Wilfred Owen’s family that he had been killed in battle one week before.” War, early death, sorrow following hard upon happiness: there are 185 pages of this to go. Markson’s narrators, like Beckett’s, often teeter on the brink of going absolutely bananas, and his approach is two parts Eliot: as plangent, tonally, as Prufrock—the monologue of another aging, lonely man—and possessed of the appropriative strength of The Waste Land. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” neatly summarizes the book, as the book’s back jacket duly notes. “Has Reader sometimes felt he has spent his entire life as if preparing for doctoral orals?” the narrator asks himself near the book’s end, after citing some 150 pages of literary and artistic arcana.

It’s enough to make anyone miserable, and yet sifting all this misery is not without its consolations. Categorize chaos, and perhaps you can keep the sadness that comes of it at bay. As coping mechanisms go, this would seem a decidedly male approach. What do men want? Not to go crazy is a good start, but sometimes, to stave off insanity, you have to do things that seem nuts. Often, the result is less than nothing. In rare, wondrous cases, the result is something like Reader’s Block.

Paul Clemens is the author of Made in Detroit.

A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

By Geoffrey Hartman (Fordham University Press, 2007)

“I feel embarrassed,” writes the great literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman in this short, epigrammatic intellectual autobiography, “when, occasionally, younger colleagues, usually Jewish, address me as ‘my teacher.’ I realize this is fond and purely honorific, a secular version of ‘Rabbi.’ But it makes me aware of the fact that I have never thought of anyone in so personal a way as a role model.” This charming and defiantly smart book helps the reader to see that no one ever could have been Hartman's role model. His is so quirky an intelligence — and so roundly informed by his own, sad past as a teenaged refugee — that his only teacher in fact was Wordsworth. Separated from his family during the war, lacking for friends, Hartman wandered the countryside with the Prelude for a companion. All that he has done since, all the difficult, brilliant essays and books, began in that war-haunted boy’s solitude with his slim volume of poetry. You can read this book for explanations of critical theory — though they are still too abstruse to make much sense to the neophyte — or you can read this book for the droppings of academic gossip (Paul de Man, Auerbach, Harold Bloom). But ultimately this book is worth reading above all for its depiction of the kind of mind that has gone out of fashion: the omnivorous European reader, fluent in many languages, autodidactic, with enough whimsy left to suggest that at Yale May Day be celebrated as Midrash Day. (“The idea had a longevity of two years,” Hartman writes, with a touch of gallows humor.) If we never really know the man — wife and family and pastimes hardly feature in this book — we know the mind, and we do get lovely reminiscences of the child, “father of the man,” as Wordsworth himself told us.

Editor Mark Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Thirteen and a Day, and lives in the Westville neighborhood.

Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl

By Mary Mycio (Joseph Henry Press, 2005)

Triggered or not by An Inconvenient Truth and its fallout, the meme is in the air of contemplating what the planet would look like if everyone vanished, which is really just a polite way of asking whether the planet might not be better off if we weren't on it. There is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, the special Life After People on the History Channel. Somehow we have trouble staying away from the image of New York City alternately underwater or covered with flowers.

In the acknowledgments to The World Without Us, Weisman tells us that his book was inspired by an article he wrote for Discover about the Zone of Alienation, the 30-kilometer circle of land around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which was suddenly (almost) depopulated in a matter of days after the reactor's catastrophic meltdown in 1986 and never resettled. Wormwood Forest is the book he could have written, as Mycio takes us on a long and eerie tour of the deserted towns and cities, overgrown fields, government posts, and squatters' farms inside the zone, where the irradiated remnants of Soviet-era civilization are crumbling into ruins as the flora and fauna reoccupy the territory we kicked them out of centuries ago. The strange news is that nonhuman life inside the Zone of Alienation--as in the DMZ between North and South Korea — is absolutely thriving, in a way that some U.S. national parks would envy, and despite the serious levels of radiation that will persist there, as far as we are concerned, almost forever. The details of this simple conceit are more than enough to fill a book, and while Mycio may not be as lyrical a writer as Weisman is, her book equals Wesiman's in power for its solid, no-nonsense reporting and, more to the point, its grounding in truth. The World Without Us speculates that the world could recover from us; Wormwood Forest shows us that it most certainly can.

Editor Brian Francis Slattery is a banjo player and the author of Spaceman Blues.