Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood

By Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Recently, more Americans than ever are getting to know Anne Enright, whose novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. But almost nobody here has read Making Babies, which has yet to find an American publisher. It’s hard to describe the fascination these spiky, lovely essays on motherhood have for me, a woman without a child or any particular wish for one. Like memoirs by mountain climbers or four-star chefs, these are dispatches from a world of exhilarating and frequently terrifying physicality, creativity, and endurance. “A child came out of me,” Enright writes. “I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing.” This vulnerable, defiant voice marks each page: deft, exact, and deceptively casual, as in The Gathering, Enright’s style perfectly conveys the permeability of self to the world that motherhood — like writing — can heighten. The brain “tries to make you feed anything helpless, or wonderful, or small,” she explains. “So I have let down milk for Russian submariners and German tourists dying on Concorde. Loneliness and technology get me every time, get my milk every time.” Her ironic feminism, inflected by her Irish Catholic upbringing, animates descriptions of nurses’ reactions to male and female babies’ genitalia, divisions of household labor, and the body’s mattter-of-fact disorder: “Women leak so much,” she writes. “Perhaps this is why we clean — which is to say that a man who cleans is always ‘anal,’ a woman who cleans is just a woman.” These passionate dispatches from an ongoing mystery were as compelling to write as they are to read. “The reason I kept writing about my babies,” she tells us, “even when they were asleep in the room, was that I could not think about anything else… I wanted to say something about the anxiety of reproduction, the oddness of it, and how it feels like dying, pulled inside out.” Making Babies takes a reader inside the new world of motherhood — a stained, dark, complicated, and beautiful place — as few other writers are willing to do.

Amy Weldon teaches English at Luther College.

Burning the Sea

By Sarah Pemberton Strong (Alyson Books, 2002)

When I was a kid, my family used to go to the Caribbean for vacation in the summer. Once, on a beach in Barbados, I watched a conch fisherman in the rough surf right off shore, just a man with a set of fins, a long metal pole, and a knife, diving over and over again to the bottom about twelve feet below him. When he came to shore he had a shell in his hand that I coveted at once. I don't remember how the exchange began, but I must have asked him for it, because I remember what happened next in great detail.

"You want this?" he said. I told him I did. He looked at my parents nearby and his expression changed, to something not altogether friendly. Without a word, he slid his knife into the shell and made a long incision. The shell began to bleed, much more than I thought it was going to. Then the man took the shell in one hand and the metal pole in the other, and began to beat the shell, hard, until the shell spat pieces of dead conch onto the sand. When the man was done, the shell was speckled with gore; he bent down, washed the shell in the water surging around his feet, and handed it to me.

"There," he said. "There’s your shell."

Later I learned a little bit more about the Caribbean and its history; the ways that crime, revolution, the legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the fact that it is a paradise occasionally visited by savage weather have given the region a distinct eeriness — a sense of beauty and threat — that I only caught glimpses of as a tourist. When I read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea a decade ago, it was a revelation, a book that had seemingly mined that eeriness deeply, and I wondered if I would ever come across its equal again.

Before I say what I am about to say, please know I am fully aware of Wide Sargasso Sea’s canonical status in both Caribbean and feminist literature, and that I dislike hyperbole when describing books. Now listen: Sarah Pemberton Strong's Burning the Sea is the heir and equal — and possibly superior to — Wide Sargasso Sea. It is a book of such grace and terror that I despair of finding another book like it for a long time.

Burning the Sea is about Michelle, an American, and Tollomi, a Cruzan, who have both lost touch with their families and the places they're from. Both also have unusual relationships with their pasts: Michelle has trouble remembering much of hers at all, while Tollomi remembers so much that he's drowning in it. They meet by chance in the Dominican Republic, when Tollomi, a charming polyglot, bails Michelle out when she is detained at the airport; thrown together, they fall quickly into an intense friendship as Michelle searches for a plot of DR land bequeathed to her by her grandfather while Tollomi begins an affair with a young Dominican man. The people they meet along the way draw them into Dominican opposition politics, as they may or may not become connected to a rash of fires being started in the luxury hotels along the shore. Meanwhile, there are hints that Michelle's past involves something she may not want to remember.

Strong brings in a lot of ideas at once, and for much of Burning the Sea all is exquisite tension, as the characters follow their desires and Strong elaborates upon and begins to connect her multiple themes. The first three quarters of the book have a dreamy, luxuriant menace to them; somehow, somewhere, on the next page, something is going to go terribly wrong. Then, in the final quarter, Burning the Sea becomes almost unbelievably good, though telling you how would ruin the book enough that I won't say anything more about what happens. It doesn't become merely a political screed, or soap opera, or melodrama, or horror story, as in lesser hands it very well might have. Instead, it becomes all these things at once, and also something transcendent: a rumination on identity, history, and memory; the violence shot through it all; and how to come to terms with them, nationally, personally, and politically.

The real reason I can't get Burning the Sea out of my head over a year after reading it, however, is the writing. With sentences sharp, elliptical, gorgeous, and sinister, Strong finds the same vein that Rhys tapped into in Wide Sargasso Sea and tears it wide open. Burning the Sea's ideas set the brain on fire, but Strong's writing stops the heart.

Given how fickle the book world can be, that a book this good has gone unrecognized is perhaps understandable; that it is currently out of print, as Burning the Sea seems to be, is baffling. This should be fixed — now — so that this book has a chance to sit alongside the company it deserves.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

On Kay Ryan

The spindly, aphoristic poetry of Kay Ryan, our new poet laureate

If Emily Dickinson, as Ted Hughes once suggested in his exquisite, under-read introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, combined “the riddle and the hymn,” Kay Ryan has selected the margin and the aphorism. Ryan is a gleaner, a poet constantly imagining and fleshing out whimsical circumstances such as those suggested by a quick sampling of her titles: “Living With Stripes,” “Imaginary Eskimos,” “The Fourth Wise Man” (who, in Ryan’s conception, “disliked travel”), “Death By Fruit.” She’s a champion of underdogs and the overlooked. A poem titled “The Excluded Animals” begins, “Only a certain / claque of beasts / is part of the / crèche racket,” later imagining the toothy grins of “unchosen alligators.” The title poem of Elephant Rocks extends this theme in its description of odd surfacings at the “edges and marges” and the pushing of fragments of “shambling elephant armature, / up through the earth.” In fewer than twenty lines, Ryan explores the extraordinary strangeness of elephants, the craggy, rock-like nature of their humps and bulges, the enduring value of what is “too patient and deep to be lost,” and the artistic process itself. Her margins are achingly, eerily, wonderfully alive.

Though her lines are often half the length of those of her predecessor, Ryan’s aphorisms are fully Dickinsonian in their oddness. “Doubt uses albumen / at twice the rate of work,” she tells us, and later “Time is rubbery. / If you hide it / in the shrubbery / it will wait / till winter and / wash back out.” She is often quite tender, for instance when she assures us that “Patience is / wider than one / once envisioned” and calms us with the notion that “There could be nutrients / in failure — / deep amendments / to the shallow soil / of wishes.” Don’t be fooled, though, for, as Ryan herself puts it, “Tenderness and rot / share a border. / And rot is an / aggressive neighbor / whose iridescence / keeps creeping over.” Ryan delights, but she does not console. Her filament-like poems are short, spindly, slant-rhymed contraptions, punctuated by deliciously exact words such as “sedges,” “lacunae,” “apertures,” and “castanets.” Hers is a poetry of “herringbones and arrows,” one that evokes the “guilty shimmer” of cribbed objects. Ryan prefers the third person to the first, and her poems revolve around animals and strange facts rather than interpersonal relationships. Reading her work, I hear the voice of a particularly wry, elegant schoolteacher whispering into my ear. As she writes in “Outsider Art,” “We are not / pleased the way we thought / we would be pleased.”

Emily Moore teaches English at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the Yale Review.

Man on Spikes

By Eliot Asinof (orig. pub. 1955; reissue by Southern Illinois University Press, 1998)

The writer Eliot Asinof is best known for Eight Men Out, a history of the 1919 Black Sox baseball gambling scandal. Those who are unfamiliar with the book might recognize its title because of the popular 1988 John Sayles film, based on Asinof’s work. If Eight Men Out is Asinof’s most popular book, his mid-century baseball novel, Man on Spikes, might be his most intriguing. Columnist Jimmy Cannon even described it as the “truest novel I’ve ever read.” Since it’s virtually unknown, however, Man on Spikes might better be labeled the truest novel they’ve never read.

Loosely based on the real-life experiences of Mickey Rutner, the 1955 novel chronicles the travails of career minor leaguer Mike Kutner. A Kentucky native, Kutner is the son of a gruff, immigrant coal-mining father who doesn’t understand his son’s desire to play baseball. Discovered by a scout, Kutner signs a minor league contract with a $2,000 bonus — the money helps assuage his father’s initial objections. His team’s crochety manager refuses to play him because he doesn’t think he has the talent; in response, Kutner asks to be traded. The manager says he will, on the grounds that Kutner lets the team decrease his signing bonus to $250. With no other options, Kutner agrees.

This financial malfeasance is only the beginning of Kutner’s misfortune. A talented player who hits for average and runs and fields well, he enjoys success at the top minor league levels. But he runs into a string of bad luck, spending some of his prime playing years serving in World War II. Kutner also runs into a system that is stacked against him.

As it is in Eight Men Out and so many of his other works, Asinof’s major theme in Man on Spikes is capitalism and how it destroys the human spirit. The wealthy baseball owners, barons of the system, hold the players down. In Eight Men Out, Asinof reinterpreted the Black Sox scandal as a protest by the White Sox players against their tight-fisted owner, Charles Comiskey. In doing so, he revolutionized our understanding of the scandal, in which the favored White Sox threw the series to the Cincinnati Reds. Until Asinof and Sayles, people thought of the players as the scandal’s villains, rogues who willingly damaged the National Pastime for extra cash. Man on Spikes is far more prophetic that Eight Men Out. There are a few good men who back Kutner — the scout who originally signs him, a manager who sees his value. But more frequent are those who either run the system, i.e., team owners, or are pawns of it: Journalists, for example, are in the owners’ clutches. Even the Major League commissioner, although sympathetic to Kutner’s plight, is powerless. The thing is, it’s all true: Until the mid nineteen-seventies and the advent of free agency, baseball players were the property in perpetuity of the team that originally signed them. About fifteen years before free agency became the touchstone issue in sports labor relations, Asinof wrote it all down in Man on Spikes.

Asinof’s own experience with individual powerlessness was no fiction. During the McCarthy era, Asinof was blacklisted from Hollywood. In his angry Bleeding Between the Lines, which chronicles his struggles over the legal rights to Eight Men Out and is also a partial memoir, he writes that “the sole reference to my subversiveness was a petition I had signed in 1951, outside Yankee Stadium, urging the New York Yankees to hire a Negro ballplayer.” I attempted to ask Asinof about the blacklist and other issues during a phone interview earlier this year, but he cut the interview off after a few questions, saying he didn’t feel well.

In Bleeding, published in 1979, he also makes clear his anger toward the system. Just before discussing the career of Marlon Brando (Asinof was married for several years to Brando’s sister, Jocelyn), he launches into a rant against postwar, Watergate-era America: “We had become an affluence of leeches, wheeler-dealers, hustlers, brokers, manipulators — some legal, some not.”

Asinof’s rage against the machine pervades Man on Spikes. The book is a fast-paced novel. It’s chock-full of action and physical description, with Kutner as its quasi-tragic hero whose fruitless pursuit of his dream (it’s no stretch to see the story as symbolic of the destructiveness of the American dream) beats him down. Near the end of Kutner’s career, Asinof places these thoughts in the mind of Kutner’s wife, Laura, as she watches her husband play:

But now the chip on his shoulder was too plain to see. He moved like an animal stalking his prey, fast and hungry and relentless. The quiet confidence was still there but it had a sullen edge to it. He was tired.

Laura, too, is weary. Two-thirds of the way through Man on Spikes, she has become an aging, boozy beauty. In the book’s most moving scene, she gets drunk in a hotel bar with the son of a big-league owner, willing to sleep with him to advance his husband’s career. Only because he passes out in his hotel room do the two not have sex.

In his preface to the 1998 edition of Man on Spikes, Asinof acknowledges that he was inspired by his friend Mickey Rutner (they met as minor league teammates), who had a career trajectory similar to Kutner’s. Like the book’s hero, Rutner spent years toiling, and excelling, at the top minor league levels with little to show for his efforts. In Bleeding Between the Lines, Asinof approvingly quotes Rutner teaching him the following line: “Fuck ’em all, big and small.”

I met with Mickey Rutner early in 2005 for an oral history project on Jewish baseball players being conducted by a group called Jewish Major Leaguers. Then in his mid-eighties (he died in October 2007 at the age of 87), the Bronx-born Rutner seemed to have come to terms with his almost-but-not-quite baseball journey; he was proud of his lifetime batting average of .295 playing mainly in the highest levels of minor league ball. He told me: “I said, ‘Get those men on base and I’ll knock them home.’ I wasn’t a great fielder and I didn’t have a great arm but I was a good hitter.”

Rutner was also pleased with being Asinof’s model. He confirmed the general outline, and some of the specifics, of Man on Spikes. Like his fictional counterpart, Rutner was denied part of his original bonus, World War II harmed his career (although he was proud of having served in the U.S. Army in Sicily while under attack from Germany), and he was lied to by owners and managers who repeatedly promised him he would be called up to the Big Show. Despite the exorbitantly high salaries players earn today, there’s little doubt that the system is fairer than in the old days, when players were unable to sell their services to the highest bidder. As Rutner told me simply, “They owned you and they could do what they want with you.”

There’s one major biographical difference between Rutner and his fictional alter ego. In Man on Spikes, Mike Kutner’s not Jewish — his father is a German immigrant. In the preface to the second edition, published in 1998, Asinof addresses this issue: “Is there anti-Semitism present in baseball? Does a bear dump in the woods? [But t]o make my hero a Jew would distort the impact that all ballplayers were victimized.”

Asinof was unwilling to make his protagonist Jewish, but he was willing to play hardball with his politics: In Man on Spikes, the system is to blame. The system has even defeated the owner’s son, a Harvard grad who was drawn to Laura Kutner in the bar because he “wanted to cut the never-ending dullness that was his life.” Any union agitator would have been proud. There’s a reason why Marvin Miller, the man responsible for developing the baseball players’ union in the 1960s and ’70s, later called Asinof a “prophet — with honor.”

Rutner himself didn’t mind that his character wasn’t Jewish, although he identified as a Jew (his kids had celebrated becoming b’nai mitzvah, and he and his wife, Lee, belonged to a chavurah down in Texas, where they lived in retirement). He told me he felt welcomed by the Southern communities that he often played in, even more so by the Jewish community. He and Lee, explained that the Sokol Brothers, owners of an Alabama department store chain, had asked them to stay and live in Birmingham, where he played one year. Rutner turned down the offer because he wanted to play baseball. He also said he didn’t think anti-Semitism had kept him out of the major leagues, although he had encountered some problems:

There were always remarks. They always say, “The rich Jews up in those stands up in the park” and so forth. I’d say, “Those rich Jews up in those stands are paying your salary.” You know, you got to put them in their place. I got into a couple of fights. I remember in the clubhouse one time one of the guys was pitching and I musta made an error and he made some remark, so I went at ’em.

So why isn’t Man on Spikes more popular? In part, it may be because it’s sports fiction. With a few exceptions, like Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, sports novels aren’t considered high art. The fact that Man on Spikes, unlike The Natural or Eight Men Out, was never made into a movie, although it has been optioned a few times, doesn’t help.

In part, too, it’s Asinof’s own fault. He partially sacrifices his novel on the altar of his leftist politics, describing Kutner, at times, like a hero out of a Soviet socialist-realist novel. After he meets with the commissioner of baseball, the commissioner “watched the athlete now in that walk, in the spring of those powerful legs.” The paragraph ends: “The last thing he saw was the neck bronzed by the hot Southern sun as the ballplayer disappeared in the lobby.”

In Man on Spikes, Kutner eventually makes it to the major leagues as a late-season call-up, but he strikes out in a key game and then quits. Only after he makes that decision to leave the sport do Kutner and Laura experience a sense of liberation and relief. That’s not exactly how it happened in real life. Rutner made it to the big leagues for a few games, in September of 1948. During his twelve games in the Major Leagues, he had a game-winning hit at Yankee Stadium, not far from where he grew up. As he put it, “That was the biggest thrill of my life.” Sometimes, it seems, life is at least a little happier than art.

I never got a chance to find out if Eliot Asinof’s life, too, was happier than his art. He died at the age of 88 on June 10, 2008, less than a year after his good friend Mickey Rutner.

Peter Ephross’s articles and reviews have appeared in the Village Voice, The Forward and Publishers Weekly, among other publications.

The Great Kisser

By David Evanier (Rager Media, 2007)

We all do it, right? Before we read a book, we look at the blurbs, look at the publishing house, look at the bio, look at the acknowledgments, put it all together, and try to figure out if this writer is somebody. (Isn’t it nice to pigeon-hole a writer before you’ve read one word of her work?) But then sometimes you do all that stuff and at the end of it still have no idea what to think. Such was the case after I’d done my superficial canvass of The Great Kisser, by David Evanier, published by the little known — okay, unknown — Rager Media, of Akron, Ohio. Never heard of the guy, for one thing. Couldn’t quite believe that, as his bio claimed, he’d once been fiction editor of The Paris Review. And while one blurb was from Sven Birkerts, and another from Stephen Dixon, the third was from Norman Podhoretz.

Stumped.

So I read the book.

It is splendid. A story cycle that loses some power as it goes along — its constituent parts get a bit repetitive — it is the travelogue through life of one Michael Goldberg, a New York kid, now in his upper years, a writer who never quite made it, spent some time in Hollywood, didn’t quite make it there either, unlucky in love, obsessed with Sinatra and the other crooners. Misplaced in time, probably should have been born fifty years earlier. The courtship rituals of an earlier era would have helped him with the ladies, and the music was more to his liking. The opening novella, “The Tapes,” about Goldberg’s psychiatrist’s leaving him tapes of dozens of hours of sessions with patients, is funny, touching, touched, and memorable. “Scraps,” about the high school sweetheart who got away, is so wonderfully dead-on earnest you almost have to look away.

If you don’t quite get it yet, think Starting Out in the Evening, by Brian Morton, mixed with some of the poignant scenes from Annie Hall and some of the bleak sex one finds in Leonard Michaels. In fact, this book’s closest kin is Michaels’s gets-in-your-bones good novella Sylvia. Same NYC without the air-conditioning, love that can’t last, that sort of thing. New Yorkish and Jewish and intellectual, but lacking confidence and mostly lacking money — that’s Michael Goldberg. Also, he has a weird affinity for mobsters.

Good books are published in Akron, it seems.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.

The End of the World

By Paddy O'Reilly (University of Queensland Press, 2007)

The follow-up to Paddy O’Reilly’s debut novel, The Factory (2005), The End of the World is a collection of the stories that have won her accolades including The Age short story competition and the Zoetrope: All-Story short fiction contest. It is immediately clear why O’Reilly has been so applauded and well published: She hops across genre lines in a mixture of different styles and voice, but always writes with pathos and empathy, without sentimentality, and with a good dose of humor.

In "FutureGirl," there's sorrow and comedy when a freakishly large girl realizes that she won't live as long as regular-sized people. There’s no hiding the vivid imagination behind “Speak to Me,” in which an alien tries to communicate with a fantasy writer in Regency-romance English. The title story — a highlight — depicts a woman who is leaving her partner, watching in her rearview mirror as his car follows her for hours (they even stop for gas at the same time). The story’s end plays out like a short film; perhaps we have O’Reilly’s background as a screenwriter to thank for that.

There is nothing predictable here. A short story writer can fall into the trap of using the same structure or narrative arc again and again; O’Reilly is always crisp, new, and striking, whether she is writing in a realist mode or working up a very literary science fiction story. Whatever the situation O’Reilly puts them in, however, her unusual bunch of characters are universal in their needs and the way that they express or refuse to express them. Even in the strangest contexts, the turning moments within each of these stories are heartbreakingly familiar.

Louise Swinn is the editorial director of Sleepers.

Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests

By John Kricher and Roger Tory Peterson, with illustrations by Gordon Morrison (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)

Pity the poor “reference” book — sturdy and uncomplaining, plastic-bound for a dictionary stand or a doctor’s office or, in the case of Peterson Field Guides, a backpack. Need, rather than pleasure, drives us to seek it out. What a shame. Because what pleasures it can give. Take, for instance, the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests. For anyone with ties to a specific rural place — or just drawn to the concept of “place” itself — this is a treasure. As a former Alabama farm kid now living in Iowa, I’m captured by the Field Guide’s wealth of resonant terminology: old field succession (the gradual dissolution of pastures back into forest, seen on so many abandoned farms), windthrow (“an important disturbance factor, creating gaps of various sizes that permit light to enter, churning up the soil and providing new sites where seedlings and saplings can grow”), and forest islands (“as suburbia and agriculture have each claimed ever-increasing amounts of land, forests in many areas have become fragmented”). There are careful descriptions of animals: meadow voles (“husky little rodents”), possums (“gives birth to babies so tiny that a dozen will fit on a tablespoon”), and roadrunners of the Texas savanna (“reminding one of a tiny feathered dinosaur as it races along.”) The tone is quietly humorous, quietly marveling. “Don’t bother looking for Field Sparrows in an Oak-Hickory Forest and forget about finding Hermit Thrushes hopping between ragweed stalks,” it advises. “The factors by which birds recognize and orient themselves to their chosen habitats are poorly known.” Today, rooted in a place eleven hundred miles from my home, I’m reminded of rainy days spent poring through my family’s Peterson guides, and the way the sturdy pages with their color paintings rendered the familiar creatures of my world — rat snakes, mockingbirds, bobwhite quail, fox, and white-tailed deer — miraculous. “With persistence and patience,” the authors promise, “you will see many species and come to understand many facets of their natural history.” This is a patience and persistence we need more than ever. And so we need the Petersen Guide — a handbook of quiet ecstasy, organizing the wonders of the visible world for anyone who cares to look.

A graduate of Auburn University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amy Weldon is assistant professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

Nostalgia

By Mircea Cărtărescu (trans. Julian Semilian; New Directions, 2005)

Despite living in a part of the world in which the future is necessarily the most fertile ground, Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu has encamped himself in the past. And not the official past of dull, stultifying life under communism, but the idealized, oneiric past that is childhood. Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia suffers less from its titular malady than from its perversion: “Ostalgie,” a word coined in the former GDR, combining Ost (East) and Nostalgie into a singular longing, for better or worse, for the way things used to be but never were.

If Moscow was the Third Rome, then Bucharest here is the “Paris of the East” — though glitteringly tawdry in skyline, its streets still mired in mud. Into this metropolis, where livestock shrieks and pecks in the courtyards of concrete apartment towers, Cărtărescu (born 1956, pronounced “Curterescue”) ventures in masterful style. Less a novel-in-stories and more a collection, less a collection than an Easterly dictionary of illegal dreams, Nostalgia begins with an assault on the spokesperson for this zeitgeist, Franz Kafka of Prague. “The Roulette Player” marks the endgame of Kafka’s art, its world a purgatory wherein the Hunger Artist fasts on the grubs of the man-ape; the Odradek waits on the breadline with K. According to Cărtărescu, Bucharest’s homeless were often conscripted into games of Russian Roulette (the “Russian” epithet is hardly mentioned). Six men would pass a revolver loaded with a single bullet; spectators, Bucharest’s wealthy demimonde, would place bets on who would survive. Our hero is doubtlessly the greatest: He goes solo rounds with two bullets enchambered, with three, with four, even — with inexorable logic, obligatory to the art of speculation, and speculative fiction — with five. Ladies and gentlemen, fully loaded with six should be next. Each time, as he squeezes the trigger, he faints. As his feats promote him from basement sideshows to sinister dinner-theater (the lights dim, a chink of light appears from behind the Iron Curtain), no bullet is ever fired. As his life falls apart, the roulette player’s head remains on his neck.

After going these rounds with Kafka, the ludic author, like his rouletteist, transcends, as if he had proven his credentials (received his own “European education”), and is only now certified to try his hand at lives closer to home. Updating Poland’s Bruno Schulz, Cărtărescu begins to write about youth not as formative, but as everything. In this world, all experience signifies just as it did at initial encounter: To a boy of the fallen bourgeoisie, mundanity can be nothing but magical. Here, for example, is a first ride in an elevator, as if up to the seat of the Godhead:

Underneath, hundreds of meters below our feet, we saw Bucharest stretching out before us, tortuous as a labyrinth drowning in a vortex of dust. The tallest buildings […] were all wrapped in a variety of fogs, mother-of-pearl, yellowish, pale pink. Bucharest like a spider web, on the strands of which crawled streetcars with their ringing bells and the trucks with their trailers. Bucharest full of scaffoldings and cranes, hospitals and post offices and tiny newspaper stands. With gray lakes shaped like stomachs, opening out into each other. […] Bucharest with its men in white shirts and slicked-back hair. With soccer stadiums invaded by young workers with emaciated faces under their gray workers caps, shouting and standing when a soccer player, slicked-back hair as well and shorts down to his knees in the Moscow Dynamo team style, kicks the leather ball into the torn net. Bucharest resounding with songs whose purpose is to mobilize the people: ‘Dear laggard Comrade Marin, / with you in charge we’ll never win’ […]

Entire pages pass like this — fantastic winged elevators or soccer balls, flitting toward the light of the real, only to be immolated for getting too close. These stylistic fantasies, which change content and fantasist throughout Nostalgia’s five sections, are mated to plots equally strange. In “Mentardy” (Mendebilul in Romanian, a concatenation of “mental” and “debility”), a pure, puny, Christlike child falls victim to friends in the yard of his housing project; in “The Twins,” an account of transvestitism degenerates into the alchemical merging of sexes, in the persons of a young man and woman whose flirtations cause them to lose their identities to love. In “REM,” the longest section of the book’s middle, also titled “Nostalgia” (composed of three sections set between “The Roulette Player” prologue — said to be written by the grown protagonist of “The Twins” — and “The Architect” epilogue), a girl is sent to the outskirts of town, where she is taught to dream under the tutelage of a giant, who might also be the tale’s author except for the fact that all he can write is the word “no” (and “no, no, no, no, no, no […]”). Ignore the preciousness, and such exuberances of language — Cărtărescu’s fluid formalism translates all into some of the most imaginative literature since that of the masters mentioned by name in the text (Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar, among others).

Nostalgia’s final section is set in the midst of the 1980s, decade of the Blue Jeans Generation. An architect, renowned for his factories that produce sunflower oil, has decided to purchase a Dacia — a wonderful Romanian automobile that often stalled, when it didn’t explode. Amazingly, it has a horn, the siren sound of which obsesses our hero, who, like many architects, feels a kinship with music (Goethe once remarked that architecture was “frozen music”). Soon, he’s had the car stripped of its tires, and a primitive keyboard installed in the dash. All day and night, living in the immobilized Dacia, “The Architect” plays music through the speaker of that horn. Thanks to the support of a young, ambitious musicologist, he becomes famous. His improvisations resound throughout Bucharest; in time, they’re heard in the West. Then, reality ends on a dissonance. Man resolves into machine. Like the universe, the Architect’s talent expands: “The great synthesizer was now an internal element of the immense body.” It’s amid this coda that Cărtărescu’s own transformation is aired: The childlike, he says, instead of growing up, must dissent and do the opposite, becoming always younger, as if returning to a state of terminal youth, which is art. Advocating yet another Revolution, Cărtărescu fictionalizes his manifesto: Art must not merely entertain life, or even affect it; instead, art must dream life itself. “The matter of [the architect’s] body and his arms, having reached in the course of the migration an extreme state of rarefaction, condensed itself during a period of incommensurable time, lost its consistency, and became star crumbs, which ignited suddenly in the darkened and empty universe. A young galaxy revolved now, throbbing, pulsating in place of the old one.”

Joshua Cohen’s review of a Mahler biography appears in the July issue of Harper’s.

Lee Sandlin

Usually, we use this Monday post to recommend an unfairly neglected book. Today we’d like to introduce you to an unfairly neglected writer.

I’m now at that biblical age (New Testament age, anyway) of thirty-three, which is about when many of us decide that we know the names of all the good writers we’ll need to know. Not that we’ve read all the great books, or ever will, but that coming across an entirely new name whose work, upon discovery, instantly seems essential is an increasingly rare phenomenon. The last time it happened was when I found Dave Hickey’s amazing collection of essays, Air Guitar. Or maybe it was when my friend Emily Moore introduced me to the poet David Wagoner. Well, it’s happened again. His name is Lee Sandlin.

For a class I am teaching in the fall, I assigned a terrific collection of journalism, edited by Ira Glass, called The New Kings of Nonfiction. It includes pieces by many of the greats—Susan Orlean, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Weschler--and a couple pieces by people I hadn’t heard of. One such piece is Lee Sandlin's “Losing the War,” which originally appeared in the Chicago Reader. It is a classic essay, easily better than most of what appears in any magazine in the United States.

I won’t do much to summarize the essay, which thankfully is online, except to say that it’s a meditation about our historical memory of World War II: how war fever made it impossible for even great reporters to write accurately about the war then, and how historians have failed to find the language to write about it since. The essay does not read as if it’s written by more scholarly writers on war and memory, like the redoubtable Paul Fussell, whose books are brilliant and clear, but not, well, fun; Fussell is too much the literary critic (except when he’s not, as in the hilarious book Class, which is one of the few books that will actually make you laugh out loud). Lee Sandlin’s essay is accessible and blunt, personal and cerebral at the same time.

Sandlin has written other long, brilliant essays for the Chicago Reader. Most of them seem to be posted at his web page. It’s a cool page, filled with Desert Island lists of favorite books and songs, most of which I have never heard of. The level of obscurity is a bit maddening. This is a man who recommends that we listen to “Night Recordings from Bali” and tells us which is his favorite Icelandic saga (Njal’s, if you care). And don’t even get me started on his list of “Several Movies That Do Not, In Any Way, Shape or Form, Suck.”

I’d raise high the poseur lantern if not for the fact that a) he seems to have a sense of humor about all this (his list of recommended recordings is called “Old, Scratchy and Mostly Unintelligible Spirituals”) and b) Jesus, can the guy write. As a former alt-weekly editor, I am humbled that elsewhere in the country one of my peer publications was publishing stuff like this. As a writer, I envy the man’s gift. As a civic booster in the city of Publishing, I hope some editor will collect this man’s essays into a single volume, fast.

Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan

By Ted Berrigan (Edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan; University of California Press, 2005)

I had a friend at high school called Andy Mitchell (Mitch) who had the knack of befriending anyone he happened to meet and charmingly cadging anything from confidence to cigarettes to sex. No Charles Ryder, he was at the time a slightly overweight boy of fair if unprepossessing features, hair tending to the lank and clothes tending to the untucked. His charm was his vulnerability, as well as his gusto for life and the ideas that glue its disparate parts together. He was a voracious and wonderfully perceptive reader, though, who, courtesy of one of the most favorable offers they could give, headed off from our unfashionable provincial grammar school to read English at Oxford.

Reading The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan is like a journey into an adult American Mitch. Berrigan has the same gregarious vulnerability of the perennial outsider (he came to New York with the so-called Tulsa Group and had a love-hate relationship with Columbia, where he knew students) mixed with the surprisingly sinewy literary mind of a true believer in language. His poems, stretching across the 1960s and 1970s, document a life, a lifestyle, and an attitude to life that is refreshingly different from what’s modeled by some of the circumscribed, corporate, careful artists of today. Along with throwaway lines testifying to his careless promiscuity (“If I fall in love with my friend’s wife, she’s fucked”) from the children’s-book-looking “Bean Spasms,” his oeuvre includes comic poems like “Winter” (“The Moon is Yellow. / My Nose is Red”).

Allowing him the formal leeway for such experiments, perhaps, was his book The Sonnets (1964), for which he received the Poetry Foundation Award. It is a sequence of seventy-seven poems that deal with his daily life, his loves, and the sonnet form itself. The sonnets he uses are a far cry from Donne’s or Shakespeare’s, but this sequence tracing Berrigan’s own poetic education offers treatments of the sonnet more sympathetic than might be expected from an experimental beat poet. Berrigan showed that the sonnet was not necessarily about iambic pentameter, but rather a form dependent upon certain intimate relationships of rhythm and understandings of the world. To effect these relationships he borrows liberally from the world and the poets around him. The sequence contains translated, unattributed verse from Rilke and Rimbaud, snatches of conversations overheard, and recycled lines of his own from earlier in the series. It is, perhaps, the most impressively contemporary book about the sonnet that the twentieth century produced.

I’ve lost touch with Mitch, but I hope he has a better fate than Ted Berrigan, who died on July 4, 1983, of liver complications after years of health problems exacerbated by amphetamine use, long-standing but undiagnosed hepatitis, and inability to afford medical care. If Mitch did die early, he could do worse than be commemorated by a book like this--a comprehensive book lovingly packed full of life and serious daily literary exercise by Berrigan’s poet wife, Alice Notley, and his poet sons, Edmund and Anselm Berrigan. It’s a book to pick up for half an hour every week for the rest of your life, share the experiences of a lifetime lived in and for art, and witness in action the reformulation of poetry for a modern life.

Dan Friedman is an associate editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. He is the only writer for Da Ali G Show to have a Ph.D. from Yale.

Of Kids & Parents

By Emil Hakl (Translated by Marek Tomin; Twisted Spoon Press, 2008)

On page two of Emil Hakl’s Of Kids & Parents, when you find out that for the rest of this novel, a father and son will walk around Prague and talk about life, an ill-advised Ulysses-meets-Tuesdays with Morrie situation might roll camera in your head, as it did mine. Be not afraid. Hakl is a lot of things — poet, dramatist, Czech, Ginsu-sharp dialogue writer — but he is not a sentimentalist. Father, seventy-one, and son, forty-two, drink too much and talk about fried chicken, ugly airplanes, dead friends, communism, and the women who give them “belly-slapping erections.” Yes, it’s awkward. At one point, the father says, “I know father and son shouldn’t be talking to each other like this.” Bingo, and that’s where the novel’s tension comes from — enough to keep us happily flipping pages for several straight hours without ever finding a plot.

Refreshingly, Hakl doesn’t ask us to like these two. They bicker. They pontificate. They talk about women as though women were pulled muscles, to be cared for and then ignored. They’re pathetic, but they love each other just enough to keep us from setting them down.

Something I’m torn about: Father and son are almost identical. On the one hand, this gives the novel a weighty “See? Nothing ever gets any better”-ness that jibes with the tour of a city that seems to get pummeled by the neighbors every fifty years. On the other hand, because the novel is nearly all dialogue with very few I saids or he saids, if the reader loses focus for a split second, it’s virtually impossible to tell who’s talking, which makes both of their voices seem like Hakl’s (though it’s possible that some of the subtleties of their speech patterns got ironed out in the Czech-to-English translation).

That aside, Hakl has given us a fine, dark novel whose simple premise allows us to explore Prague and the elusive relationship between two unsatisfied and inseparable men.

Greg Pierce is a playwright and fiction writer who lives in New York City. This spring he is workshopping his multimedia stage adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in New York and Tokyo.

Interfictions

Edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Small Beer Press, 2007)

It is commonplace to hear that if certain canonical writers were writing today — Herman Melville, say, or James Joyce — they would never be published. Leaving aside the difficulties that such writers faced in getting their books published in their own times, it does seem that major publishing houses are skittish about publishing books that are unlike other books, difficult to classify. Which is why I like to say that if Franz Kafka or Mikhail Bulgakov were writing today, they would be published by Small Beer Press.

Kelly Link, perhaps Small Beer’s most well-known author, is also one of its editors; Link has made her reputation on a series of acclaimed short stories that bend genres and twist tropes in a Borgesian way. Likewise, Small Beer’s roster of authors is rife with writers like John Crowley and Carol Emshwiller, whose works are about as good as books get and also elude description by genre. As literary critics don’t seem to analyze anything until they’ve slapped a hot pink label on it, a host of contending terms have emerged to describe these indescribable books. One is “interstitial,” which Small Beer’s Interfictions, a multiple-author short-story collection edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, seeks not only to define, but demonstrate. The result is a wildly varied cacophony of a book, by turns beautiful, funny, frightening, frustrating, and baffling, but never boring.

Each story in Interfictions is a highwire act, writers writing without a net, and it thus isn’t a perfect collection; while no story falls outright, some are wobblier than others. But it’s telling that previous reviews of the volume have picked different stories to champion; there really is something here for everyone to be blown away by. (For the record, my favorites are Christopher Barzak’s “What We Know about the Lost Families of — House,” a haunted house story that also turns a keen eye on social conventions and the relation of people to their environment in rural Ohio, and Veronica Schanoes’s “Rats,” a story about punk rock told as an extremely self-aware fairy tale, back when fairy tales didn’t shirk from darkness and violence.)

For readers who are more interested in ambitious experiments than modest successes — and the occasional story that leaves them breathless — Interfictions is a wonderful introduction to Small Beer Press’s broader catalog and a group of writers who are widening the publishing landscape’s horizon for what’s possible in fiction.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.

The Billionaire Who Wasn’t

By Conor O’Clery (PublicAffairs, 2007)

On January 22, 1997, from a payphone in the San Francisco airport, Chuck Feeney gave The New York Times a story for the ages. Although he had appeared regularly on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, Feeney was not, he revealed, the billionaire everyone presumed. This kid-done-good from Elizabeth, New Jersey—a Horatio Alger boy on steroids—had indeed built a great fortune by mastering the duty-free trade. But the recent sale of his company, Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), had forced Feeney to confess his great secret: he had given this fortune away. In The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing, Irish journalist Conor O’Clery chronicles how Feeney quietly amassed astonishing wealth, and, with equal stealth, signed it all over to his philanthropic foundations.

O’Clery’s account reads like a spy novel. Feeney and his business partners succeed through cloak and dagger secrecy: closed bids for duty-free concessions (Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, Hong Kong), off-shore havens to shelter their cash profits from U.S. taxation. Feeney’s commercial savvy is also characterized by an uncanny intuition for profitable opportunities, a penchant for shop-floor management (well into his later years, Feeney is coaching the sales force), and remarkable care for employees and their families. These traits also underpin his philanthropy, which is characterized by fierce anonymity, opportunistic giving that seeks to amplify the power of his philanthropic buck (in places ranging from the U.S. to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, Vietnam to Cuba), and extensive vetting (“kicking the tires”) of potential grantees. Ultimately, Feeney says, he is driven by a basic desire to help others, learned at a young age from his parents.

Feeney’s is an extraordinary tale of entrepreneurial dynamism, no doubt—but even more of unusual beneficence. His “outing” presents a number of important challenges. First, Feeney embodies “inter vivos” charity—giving while living. This is significant in an era when, for many, wealth serves as a competitive “scorecard” (Feeney’s words) for success. In offering an equally competitive, alternative yardstick—charitable largesse—Feeney joins Gates, Buffett, and others in harnessing new resources for the disadvantaged. The second challenge Feeney poses is to the philanthropic sector, where foundations typically expend five percent of their assets each year. Feeney has called for a full spend-down of his Atlantic Philanthropies within the decade: inter vivos in extremis. Though to date his foundations have granted nearly $4 billion to “vulnerable” people around the world, nearly $4 billion in assets remain. This means trying to give away—efficiently, effectively, entirely—about one million dollars a day. “Spending it,” he says, “is not a big problem. Spending it meaningfully is.” Understatement, ambition and optimism: vintage Feeney.

Georgia Levenson Keohane is a writer and consultant in the fields of social policy, philanthropy, and non-profit management. She lives in New York City.

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow

By Anders Nilsen (with Cheryl Weaver) (Drawn & Quarterly, 2006)

This book will wreck you, if there’s a person in the world whom you love.

In March 2005 Cheryl Weaver, an artist and bartender and the fiancée of the cartoonist Anders Nilsen, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. By November she was dead. She was thirty-seven. Don't Go Where I Can’t Follow is Nilsen remembering her, trying to remember everything about her, recounting days they spent together and apart. Those memories are exquisitely banal: bags of chips, the losing and finding of keys, everyday conversations, travel mishaps, ice cream cones. These are what you forget when someone dies. One day you’re fighting about leaving the milk out, and the next day she’s gone.

In the early part of the book, before Weaver gets sick, there are almost no drawings — instead there are photographs, reprinted letters, other artifacts. The first image is a postcard Weaver sent to Nilsen early in their courtship: “I know this boy named Anders. He makes my heart ache and my stomach flutter.” Then come Nilsen‘s journal entries and vacation snapshots, doodles and lists (“Things He Does, in Spite of Which, She Will Probably Marry Him Anyway”). When the book finally switches over to pure drawing, the shift in tone is shocking — appropriately so, because that's when Weaver is first admitted to the hospital, complaining of fatigue. Life never goes back to normal. The book’s pages fill with sketches Nilsen makes and notes he takes while his fiancée sleeps in her hospital bed. There are excruciatingly literal, intensely concrete little portraits of Weaver sleeping, connected to an IV, her head shaved. There’s a diagram of her body, with Nilsen trying to record everything he’s seeing: IV tubes, feeding tube, urinary tube, rectal tube, surgery scars, bruises from past IVs, pulse meter, blood pressure cuff, “bag to collect aceites fluid, leaking from drainage site on abdomen,” etc. You wonder what all this detail is for. Is it so he can show her later, when she's better, what she looked like? Or is this the moment he realized she would never get better? In his journal he writes: “What do you say to someone when they ask you ‘Am I going to die?’ and you kind of think they might, but there’s no way to know, and you don’t want to upset them.”

The last chapter reads like a regular graphic novel, with traditional panels and narrative. Nilsen and his family and friends gather at Promontory Point, the spot along Lake Michigan where he and Weaver had planned to get married. The scene is cinematic—the POV hovers behind Nilsen the whole time, like someone watching without participating. We see that the crowd has grown rather large. Nilsen narrates the scene to Weaver: “There are a lot of them. I don’t know if we could have had that small wedding we talked about.” In these panels she’s the only person he talks to, like he's numb to everything but this receding connection with her in his head. “You are in my arms,” he says, and that’s when we notice that he’s holding a small black box, and figure out that he’s come here to scatter her ashes. And then we come to understand the weird camera angle, too: “I think you wouldn’t have liked this very much, to have been there,” he writes to Weaver. “Everyone fussing over you. It would have driven you nuts. . .. I think you might have liked watching it, though. Hovering above it.”

Nilsen saves a final postcard that he wrote to Weaver before she got sick for the end of the book, just to tear us apart a little bit more: “In sixty years from now, when I’m on my deathbed dying (before you, because you’re a smoker and smokers always outlast people like me with healthy habits) and you come up to our room just before I croak, I’m going to say ‘I told you so.’ Because we’ve been in love all that time and been having great sex (except for the last year because I had been ill) and been happy. And then I’m going to croak and … you won’t be sad. Because we had such a good life together.” If that doesn’t utterly destroy you, you do not have a heart beating in your chest. It’s also weirdly reassuring, and ridiculously romantic.

Anaheed Alani is a freelance writer, researcher, and editor.

Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year

By Esmé Raji Codell (Algonquin Books, 2001)

For teachers and the general public alike, Esmé Raji Codell’s Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year, which chronicles Codell’s first year of teaching in an inner-city Chicago charter school, is a refreshing antidote to the fantasy of the inner-city schoolteacher as a dedicated, creative, inspirational miracle worker in the mold of Hilary Swank’s character in Freedom Writers or Edward James Olmos’s in Stand and Deliver. The primary reason for this is that Codell is a dedicated, creative, and inspirational teacher, yet her first year of teaching does not end with a slow clap leading to a standing ovation, students standing on their desks in salute, or state-high marks on standardized exams. Even the goofy craziness, selfless investment of time outside the school day, instructional skill, and personal charisma Esmé brings to her work is sadly, as she discovers, not enough to prevent children from falling through the cracks in the public-education and social-services support networks, to dissolve the blockheadedness of well-meaning but narrow-minded administrators, or to ensure that every student performs at the legally mandated grade level on a standardized test.

As an inner-city teacher who is less creative and wacky, and possibly less instinctively skilled, than Codell, I found her book to be both inspirational and reassuring. It was instructive--and funny, and heartwarming--to see her incorporate elements of physical and imaginative play into her lessons. It was also a relief to see her lose her temper in front of her students; I was reassured to know that this happens to even the most gifted teachers. But anyone who draws pleasure from reading engaging, conversational prose will enjoy Codell’s account of her careen through her first year of teaching. Readers will also experience a firsthand account of the obstacles faced by teachers of disadvantaged children--and by the children themselves.

Codell does not fail as a teacher. It is clear that she uses her creativity successfully to engage struggling children in their schoolwork, as when she constructs a time machine for students to sit in while reading historical fiction, teaches her students the distributive property of multiplication using cha-cha steps, or insists (to her principal’s chagrin) on being called Madame Esmé rather than Ms. Codell. Still, her efforts are not enough to solve the problems at her school, or save every single one of her students.

Nathan Day is a high school English teacher at César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, Parkside Campus in Washington, DC. An outrigger canoe enthusiast, he has been teaching for six years.

Sprawling Places

By David Kolb (University of Georgia Press, 2008)

In this polemic, philosopher and place theorist David Kolb deploys unconventional thinking in the service of what turn out to be commonsense ideas. Kolb finds distinctions where others assume homogeneity; his baseline act of discernment is to recognize that suburbs are neither small villages nor large cities, and therefore should be approached as unique phenomena. Kolb rejects the many critics who, because they are looking through the lens of arcadia or the metropolis, find America’s sprawling zones devoid of intricacy—or, worse yet, “nonplaces” unworthy of consideration. Instead, he marshals many theoretical sources to argue that such places have inherent “complexity” worth amplifying. He employs this term in several ways: the structural, which largely encompasses the natural and man-made environments; the social, in which citizens negotiate with each other and the structural backdrop; and what might be called the technological-economic-political, that (mostly) invisible network of links that underpins connected life in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging these forces requires active engagement: “Places should be inhabited with more lived sense of their complex internal multiplicities and linkages, and with more self-consciousness of the multiple forces and pressures at work.” The book seems aimed primarily at the community of thinkers with whom Kolb engages, as well as architects and urban planners, and on occasion it is tough going, particularly in the first two chapters. But Kolb gains momentum as he begins a sustained analysis of themed places and suburban environments. This investigation draws in particular on the work of British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and extends to suburbs some of the claims made by Manuel Castells (for networked societies) and Henri Lefebvre (for cities). Discussing Disney parks, New Urbanist villages, and haphazardly planned suburbs as they currently exist, Kolb puts forth brief suggestions, from creating architectural follies in pocket parks to altering zoning and tax regulations, for “grasp[ing] creatively the possibilities offered by contemporary places, without undue nostalgia or elation.”

A hypertext available at Kolb’s website offers further considerations of the topic.

Brian Sholis, a writer based in Brooklyn, is editor of Artforum.com and coeditor of The Uncertain States of America Reader (Sternberg Press, 2006).

Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey

By Philip Lutgendorf (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Primates are our animal cousins, but most of us know them only on a photo-album basis. In India, people and monkeys live cheek by jowl, and relations are strained. Monkeys are dirty, aggressive pests, pelting pedestrians with nuts and climbing into open windows to grab anything not nailed down. Yet one of the subcontinent’s most beloved divinities is the monkey-god Hanuman. The hero Rama’s sidekick in the national epic Ramayana, Hanuman is revered in his own right in temples and household shrines throughout India.

Philip Lutgendorf, professor of Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, has written a fascinating study of Hanuman. Unlike traditional scholars of Hinduism who focused on theological texts, Lutgendorf is interested in everyday religious experience, where so-called “minor gods” such as Hanuman often loom larger than major ones (such as Shiva and Vishnu). Lutgendorf pursues the monkey-god through religious practice but also films, television, comics, and the garish Technicolor prints that small businesses distribute as complimentary wall-calendars. (One of these adorns the book’s cover.) He also includes Hanuman’s biography from popular legend, analyzing the many variants of each episode. According to one version, when the infant Hanuman decides to swallow the sun, the earth is cast into darkness until he coughs it up. In another version, he swallows it and is destroyed, but the gods reassemble him from tiny pieces, and in a third he puts it in his mouth but spits it out because it tastes like meat and he is a vegetarian. (His powers extend to his monkey-mother, who destroys a mountain with a jet of breast-milk.) At times, Hanuman seems an Indian version of Godzilla, a fearsome, destructive, but lovable creature, blurring the boundary between animals, humans and gods. Hanuman’s Tale brings him in his many forms to a western audience.

Jeremy Ravi Mumford teaches at the University of Michigan.

Harold Robbins’ The Looters

By Junius Podrug (Forge, 2007)

Harold Robbins' name is still selling books. Unfortunately, he died in 1997 and his name is all he has left to offer. With the blessing of the Robbins estate, the novelist's friend Junius Podrug has now written four Robbins novels. On the shiny covers of these poor substitutes, Podrug's name is dwarfed by Robbins's. The idea of continuing a successful franchise isn't deplorable (some of those Flowers in the Attic sequels are pretty good), but Podrug's complete lack of understanding about what made Robbins's novels great is a true literary crime.

In The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, or Memories of Another Day or The Raiders or any of a dozen other titles from what I consider his most fertile period--in the 1970s and 1980s, after he'd moved on from his derivative-of-John O'Hara melodramatic page-turners--Robbins created a new class of upper-class hero. His characters were conflicted and engaged in savage confrontations for their entire lives, however cushily they were raised. Their sex drives were as strong as their lusts for power and money. They were always on the verge of being blackmailed or unmasked for closeted sins that ranged from homosexuality to impotence to, in several different novels, closeted Jewish upbringings. (Robbins himself was the Brooklyn-born son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, though he disguised that heritage--he put out that he was a Jew who'd lost his parents and had been raised in a Catholic boy's school. This and many other self-made myths were debunked by Andrew Wilson in his respectful, well-researched, and culturally contextualized biography, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, published last fall.)

Robbins was able to pin the needles on all possible megalomaniac meters and make his characters both shameful and pitiable: "Joni sucked on John's penis and wept at the same time. 'We'll never -- why couldn't you have just gone to Harvard?'" (In that passage, from Tycoon, it's worth noting that Joni and John are brother and sister.) Podrug, on the other hand, writes quaint adventure tales grounded in nothing approaching reality. The Looters involves a museum curator searching for the death mask of a legendary Babylonian queen. Worse, he jettisons Robbins' essential omniscient-narrator style for a clunky first-person: "We finally reached the larger boat and I went aboard to meet the band of pirates, smugglers and thieves."

There are many who wrongly considered Harold Robbins, despite his being one of the five biggest-selling novelists in history, to be the dregs of popular fiction. All those naysayers have to do to be proved outrageously wrong is to read his chosen successor.

Christopher Arnott is the managing editor of the New Haven Advocate.

Tales of Woodsman Pete

By Lilli Carré (Top Shelf Productions, 2006)

Strictly speaking, Tales of Woodsman Pete is a comic, and it is funny and action-packed and presented in a series of frames. But it’s also touching and tragic, tender and wrenching—a stellar example of the sheer range of possibilities implicit in this surprisingly expansive medium.

Let there be no doubt: Lilli Carré is an artist. Her words are pure literature: intelligent, economical, unexpected. On the visual side, her line is confident yet simple, resembling a woodcut incision; her figures are unassuming, endearing, and utterly distinctive.

Our hero Pete is a thickly bearded hunter who lives alone in the woods surrounded by things that he has killed: his best friend Philippe (an inanimate bear rug), some mounted deer heads, and the specter of a wife slain accidentally (by buckshot or pollen, we never find out which). Pete monologues endlessly in search of conversation, ever nostalgic for missing companions but cheerfully unaware of his complicity in finding himself alone. When Pete’s house is crushed by a falling tree, the narrative frame shifts to examining the lives of the blue ox Babe and his pal Paul Bunyan (presumably the one who caused the tree to fall on Pete’s house), who is gloomy from reading Proust and depressed that, because of his bulk, it takes so many beers to get sufficiently drunk. We learn of Paul’s problems with women, not a few of whom he has “mistakenly crushed” in the act of attempting intimacy. Paul—like Pete—leaves a heavy footprint, invariably annihilating the things around him without agenda or animus. He just doesn’t fit in this world.

The narrative shuttles back and forth between Pete and Paul, two sides of a coin, united by their full beards, their utter sincerity, their love of skipping stones, and their dogged pursuit of something undefined. They are dreamers both, and both marooned in solitude. We are left wondering whether Pete is dreaming Paul or Paul is dreaming Pete. Ultimately, the pleasure lies in the question itself.

At twenty-four years of age, Carré has loudly crashed the indie comic world, and is particularly well known in her hometown of Chicago. She also makes short animated films, one of which has shown at Sundance. She’s a genius in the comics medium, but would likely be a genius in any medium. Her Pete is a worthy introduction for the curious—an incisive, delightful primer in what’s so exciting about comics these days.

Freelance writer Matthew Swanson makes books with his wife, illustrator Robbi Behr, in a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.

Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism, and Conservation, 1900-1940

By John Alexander Williams (Stanford University Press, 2007)

Even though present-day enviros may protest that their movement is for all people, in the beginning—the early twentieth century—the conservation movement had some pretty unsavory roots. In the United States, the picture wasn’t pretty—scientific racists like Madison Grant and William Hornaday loved the mountains and wildlife of the American West, even while they hated the un-American immigrants they thought were ruining everything. In Germany, things look even worse—the Nazi regime was noted for its conservationist ethic, or at least its conservationist rhetoric, which associated purity of the German race with purity of the homeland (this is a topic that historians like Frank Uekotter and Franz-Joseph Bruggemeier et al. have chewed over at length). John Alexander Williams enters this fray in his book, in which he tries to reject the narrative of a backwards-looking, antimodern German environmentalism that led inexorably down the road to racism and Nazism. To that end, Williams uncovers various groups operating in the early twentieth century that tried to equate environmentalism with the liberation of German workers. These groups included nudists (whom we have to thank for some fantastic photographs of naked Germans doing group calisthenics), hiking clubs, and youth culture organizations.

Williams succeeds in showing that a range of different ideas of “nature” existed in Germany during this era, and that some of them were very much linked with socialism and seemingly blameless, un-Nazi-ish impulses toward personal freedom. Williams’s argument tries to save environmentalism from Nazism partially by showing how environmentalists who thrived in the Weimar era were put out of commission by the Nazi program. The freedom-loving socialist nudists, for example, were reduced to trying to survive with a variety of political strategies, including writing letters to Nazi leaders, as one such nudist did, praising the Hitler salute for its calisthenic properties (“the salute makes it impossible to have a crooked or rounded back”). Williams’ strategy sometimes leans overmuch toward an admiring glorification of socialism, but overall the book scrambles the green Nazi image enough that environmentalists can heave a momentary sigh of relief.

Rebecca Onion is a freelance writer and a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.