Zoot-Suit Murders by Thomas Sanchez

Younger saw it. A huge sign rolling through clumps of sage and spikes of yucca near the mountaintop. Nine wooden letters, each high as four men atop one another's shoulders, each letter painted white, sprawled improbably across the natural shoulder of the mountain. the letters seemed a tenuous but monstrous joke that could blow down in any retributary wind. But there the stood, naked as the last advertisement for a feeble civilization, dwarfing the simple beauty of the natural terrain, idiotic and splendid, washed in the ethereal glow of the dying sun sinking blood red into the ocean to the west:

HOLLYWOOD

The relationship between noir and Los Angeles is so funny. The city's famous for its endless summer, and in the mind's eye, it must always be daytime there--and yet, every L.A. noir seems to be set at night, or even in cold and rain. There's a relationship between the two, of course: the noirish night is the shadow of the L.A. day. It's not so much that the celluloid world of Hollywood conceals the brutality and violence of the nighttime as it's predicated on it, as if what happens at night is the engine of churning blood and bodies that make the daytime possible. It reflects a belief, I think, that any kind of pleasure or leisure requires some kind of blood sacrifice.

Thomas Sanchez's noir Zoot-Suit Murders takes its relationship to Los Angeles seriously. It begins with Nathan Younger, a Catholic social worker and amateur baseball coach (and secretly, a spy for something like the House Un-American Activities Committee) witnessing a movie star screaming for help in the barrio, the Mexican neighborhood of Los Angeles. A pair of shots ring out, hitting two of the stars' pursuers, we presume, who turn out to be undercover cops. The investigation pins the murders on the Mexican youths whose zoot suits--flashy, voluminous, and colorful--have taken on an unsavory political valence during wartime rationing. But Younger, of course, thinks that the real story is more complicated, and related somehow to Kathleen, the spokesperson for a utopian cult, who was at the scene of the crime. Kathleen is beautiful, waifish, red-headed, and chronically sick; as he gets closer to her, Younger begins to fall in love, as demanded by the genre--which also demands that love be dangerous and cruel.

Zoot-Suit Murders does a great job bringing together disparate threads of Los Angeles culture and history. There's Hollywood, of course, although the starlet in crisis turns out to be kind of a red herring. But there's aspects of Los Angeles here that are often left out of the genre, beginning with the racial and class tensions of the 1940s that infamously resulted in the Zoot Suit Riots, when a bunch of Navy soldiers went around brutalizing the young Mexicans. For Sanchez, the barrio is the site of collision between Spanish fascists and communist subversion; both forces see in the disaffection of the Zoot Suiters a kind of powerful, perhaps primeval force which can be leveraged. The novel works in the city's history as the home of evangelical fervor and woo-woo spirituality. In Kathleen--who is hard at work preparing for the arrival of "The Voice of the Right Idea." It's half Aimee Semple Macpherson, and half Scientology. Around the city, a mysterious phone number--DIALGOD--is graffitied on the walls. And Sanchez does a great job filling the cult out with a lot of very persuasive utopian nonsense, while still suggesting that the cult's true aims are more legible, while more secretive.

Sometimes, the book strains to convince us that this is Los Angeles in the 1940s. At one point, a characters says, "Yah, well they'll give Emperor Hirohito an honorary degree at UCLA before that happens." Is a final showdown at the Hollywood sign inspired, or cheesy and too-familiar? Still, I really enjoyed the way the novel takes the historical and cultural moment seriously, and situates its noirishness in time and place. It's a very different novel than Rabbit Boss, about several generations of California Indians (and which I loved), but I see in Zoot-Suit Murders a similar eagerness to grapple with the way in which California and Californian identity are fashioned in the crucible of history.

My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pan, pacing out there in the street: other people.

One day, Will meets his father by happenstance at a movie theater. His father's not alone; he has a woman with him, a white woman. Only recently have colored South Africans like Will and his father, Sonny, been able to legally patronize white theaters; for both father and son it is a kind of provocation. But for Will, it's also a realization that his father is not all that he seems. Sonny is a former teacher who has become a powerful leader and orator among those in what they call "the struggle"; part of his appeal has always been his upstanding character and the support of his stalwart wife, Aila. But Will clocks immediately what Sonny is doing at the theater, hiding an affair that has come to be the center of his life. As time passes, Sonny's attachment to the white woman, Hannah, will quietly and subtly--because in Gordimer's books, politics and power move glacially, and the explosions are usually off-screen distractions--compromise his position within the movement. But more importantly, it will compromise his position with his son.

It's interesting that Gordimer titles this My Son's Story. If anything, it ought to be called My Father's Story. It is, at heart, Sonny's story, and it alternates between the icy third person that is Gordimer's trademark and a fiery first-person from Sonny's perspective. These sections, where Sonny fulminates against his father, are the best parts of the book, and something I can't remember seeing in anything else that Gordimer's ever written. Sonny's anger at his father's infidelity and betrayal grows all out of proportion, and we can see, in subtle ways, that he lets it cloud his judgment, never quite understanding what others are saying. When he sees in his mother's expression and actions a recognition of his father's infidelity, is he right? Or does he see what he wants to see in order to make a closer ally of his mother? At the novel's end, the Sonny-narrator tells us that he has filled in the gaps of what he does not know; the third-person sections are him, too. Of course, that brings up several Oedipal questions about what it means for Sonny to describe the physical intimacy between his father and his father's lover.

One thing I liked about My Son's Story is that we get moments of anti-Black racism crisply and clearly. That's not actually the case in most of her novels, which I think present racism as something structural that happens at a deeper level. She's not often interested in the racists and bigots as much as the people fighting them. But here we see Sonny and his family move to a white neighborhood, trying to heighten the contradictions of South African society. And for a while, their presence is tolerated, until Aila is arrested for keeping a cache of weapons, and the neighborhood becomes a mob, which burns down the family's house. We are expecting, perhaps, the book to move toward a final confrontation between Will and his father, for the son to explode. But the destabilizing force turns out to be Aila, as well as Will's sister Baby. As things fall apart, we see a deeper source of Will's resentment and envy: the expectation that he of all the family will live the "normal life" that is the reward of political struggle, a struggle which he is not permitted to enter. It's a hard thing, perhaps, to bear the rewards but none of the sacrifices. The novel, then, is Will looking at himself through his father's eyes; that's why it's My Son's Story and not My Father's.

A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

A darkness, thick and burbling, like a river, spilled down over the windowpanes. Suddenly a great flash lit everything up, and the woman saw her own shadow thrown against the wall. The thunderclap reverberated a second later. She shut her eyes. If she died there, like this, in that lucid moment, while out there the sky was dancing, triumphant and free, that would be good. Decades would go by before anyone found her. She thought about Aveiro, and realized that she had stopped feeling Portuguese. She didn't belong to anywhere. Over there, where she had been born, it was cold. She saw them again, the narrow streets, people walking, heads down, against the wind and their own weariness. Nobody was waiting for her. 

Ludovica, Ludo, is afraid of the outside world, and with good reason. One day, as gunfire and rockets break out in Luanda, the capital of Angola where she lives, her sister and her sister's husband leave and never return. The country has gained its independence, but at the cost of a deadly civil war that rages right under her window. So bricks herself into the apartment. She survives by killing and eating the pigeons and monkeys that land on her balcony, and burning her books one by one. She has a little balcony garden that provides her with vegetables, and she becomes skilled at hooking her neighbor's chickens with looped ropes from several stories up. Below her, Angola grows up, but it's a process in which she's too afraid to take part. As her books burn, she writes her story--for whom?--on her walls in charcoal.

Ludo is the center of Jose Eduardo Agualusa's A General Theory of Oblivion, but only the center. Though she's hidden away in her secret chamber, she becomes enmeshed with dozens of characters who live outside. She stops herself from killing a pigeon because she sees that it's carrying a message between lovers. She spares it, and places a couple of diamonds--of no value to her, and perhaps a great danger--in its beak. The diamonds enrich a political prisoner who buys the apartment next to Ludo's, becoming her unwitting neighbor. The message turns out to have been intended for the brutal commandant who tortured him. Slowly, these and other characters, whose connections to one another are just as absurd, begin to converge on Ludo's hidden apartment. Soon, they're all there at once, including a journalist who investigates strange disappearances, a mute communist leader, and a young boy who has found his way into Ludo's company, giving her a much needed companion and himself freedom from the demands of the street gangs.

It's silly, but it works. The image we're left with is of people who ought to be, and in some cases are, bitter enemies, drawn together by hyperactive happenstance. What emerges, perhaps, is an image of a country as a network of interpersonal relations. All these characters, Black African and Portuguese, rich and poor, communist and right-wing, are ineluctably drawn together despite themselves. Their relatedness is, on a plot level, an absurd bit of near-magical realism, but on a symbolic level, they represent something larger than their own ideological, racial, and class divisions. Which is not to say they all are reconciled, but merely that this network of relations encompasses and precedes them in ways they are not fully conscious of. By the time Ludo emerges into this new Angola, three decades have passed. War is over, but its scars remain. Still, there's a hopefulness in the way the book ends, with the bricks coming down and the world entering at last.

With the addition of Angola, my "Countries Read" list is at 106!

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Such frights will come and go.

Then there'll be one that won't. One that won't go.

But for now, the corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room again for tiffs and trivialities. No more hard edges on the days, no sense of fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of tiny and relentless insects. Back to where no great change seems to be promised beyond the change of seasons. Some raggedness, carelessness, even casual possibility of boredom again in the reaches of earth and sky.

And Alice wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. In "What Do You Want to Know For?," the narrator--here, clearly a stand-in for Munro herself--undergoes a mammogram that reveals a lump in her breast. She prepares for the biopsy, and perhaps worse, but it's postponed twice, until the doctor responsible tells her that the lump has always been there, on every mammogram she's received, and it hasn't grown or changed. It's not worth cutting out. Routine accretes again around her life, which was briefly opened up into frightening possibilities, but as she writes, one day there will be a fright that doesn't go away. They're sobering words, one year after Munro's death, after the fright that did not go. And of course they are made more complicated by the revelation of Munro's complicity with the ongoing sexual abuse of her daughter. but not, I think, invalidated. Munro seems to have lied for a long time about her life, but in her stories, what she wrote had a way of being deeply true. So it's with a mix of sadness and relief that I can say there are no more Alice Munro stories left for me to read.

The View from Castle Rock may be Munro's most personal collection, even moreso than the autobiographical "Finale" that closes out Dear Life. The long first section, titled "No Advantages," is a history of Munro's Scottish family, which emigrated to Canada and the United States after the Highland Clearances in the 18th century. The title image of the book comes from one of those ancestors, who, as a little kid, was taken up a prominent hill in Edinburgh and jokingly told by his father that the body of water across the bay--really, Firth--was America. It must have seemed so close, so full of promise and threat, and it must have felt a little like fate, too, because that ancestor did become an emigrant, to the real America. These stories are fascinating and rich, although I had trouble keeping the different Williams and Andrews apart, and drawn from life as they are, they resist a kind of completeness that Munro's stories do, I think, typically possess. They are more ragged, diffuse. I loved the moment when a young boy, walking from Canada to the United States, sneaks his baby sister away from his mother and hides her in a shed, then blames the disappearance on an Indian servant they left back in Canada. (Suspicions of Indian magic make this a persuasive accusation.) The little girl is found, and the boy is never blamed, and so there is no hammer fall of the kind that Munro usually doesn't shy away from. Instead, the moment is another thread in a tapestry of immigrant life, the fabric from which the writer herself is woven.

From there, the stories move down the generations. Familiar images come back again. There's Munro's father, with his silver fox farm. There's her mother, who falls prey to a debilitating disease. We've heard these stories before, in The Lives of Girls and Women and elsewhere. But Munro had such a knack for making the same story seem new each time. She changes the name of the Ontario town--here, it's Blyth--and somehow, that's all it takes, for the story to be revived and refreshed. And of course, we get aspects of these lives we've never seen before, like the introduction of her father's new wife, a foolish and insensitive woman with the improbably name of Irlma. To what extent do the old stories develop and explain the new? Is it about historical contingency only, the obvious fact that, had these people not emigrated to Canada, there would be no Alice Munro? Or is it something else, about the way the old Laidlaws (Munro's maiden name) carved out a new home for themselves so far from Scotland, something we must always do for ourselves, no matter how far from our parents' doorstep we get? There is no permanence, of course. The lump in the breast reminds us of that. We fashion home for ourselves out of what's at hand, and even then, it's only for a little while.

I'll really miss reading a Munro story for the first time. At this moment, it's a hard thing to talk about her writing as writing. It might be nice to take a break from her for a year or two. But I can't imagine never returning to these stories again, and I do plan to come back to them someday. They'll be tinged with a double sadness--dismay or disgust on top of the lack of newness--but they are too much of home for me, too, to be left totally behind.

Doting by Henry Green

They started together, fast, for the passage. Once outside, he shouted "in here" throwing open his and Diana's bedroom. There was a bathroom opened out of this, but, because the space was small, a basin with hot and cold water had been fitted by Diana's bed. It was to this that Miss Paynton ran. Turning the hot tap on, she zipped off her skirt, and stood with her fat legs starting out of lace knickers.

"Here, let me" he said, and knelt at her side.

She picked the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, drenched it in that basin, and then, putting her hand inside the skirt she had discarded, she began to rub at the stain.

And it was at this moment Diana entered.

She stood at the door with a completely expressionless face.

"Arthur" she said "when you're done, could you come outside a minute."

In a pivotal scene in Henry Green's Doting, Diana Middleton walks in on her husband kneeling at the feet of 20-year-old Annabel Paynton. Her husband, Arthur, has just knocked over a tureen of coffee onto her dress, and they have scrambled to save it, but of course, that's not what it looks like. But it is what it looks like, because Arthur has just been making out with the girl, who is slightly older than his son, and although the scene is quite comical in its irony, if the coffee had not been spilled, Diana might just as well have walked in on Arthur and Annabel sucking face. It's a great scene, the best in the book, and perhaps the only scene, strictly speaking: mostly, Doting is told entirely in dialogue.

The half-affair between Annabel and Arthur is a pathetic thing, never consummated, and for the most part barely more than a concatenation of middle-aged put-ons and half-rebuffs. Annabel finds Arthur attractive, but admires Diana; mostly she operates by a kind of young person's instinct that's only half-able to really think through the long term implications of her own desires, whatever those might be. She's having a bit of fun, but for Arthur, the affair is a desperate one, even though he deeply loves his wife. Doting, Arthur says to Annabel at one point, is not the same as loving--that is, the kind of relationship that Arthur has with Annabel, obsessive, squalid, horny, is not really even in the same universe as his relationship with his wife. Perhaps that is the way most affairs are conducted, whether it's a truthful statement or no; we love our partners even as we betray them, and need not really feel dissatisfied to be captivated by the allure of someone else.

Diana mostly turns a blind eye, even encourages Arthur in what seem to be his harmless attentions. They set up rules that are as pathetic as the affair itself--no meeting at night, no bringing her to the house--and which of course are immediately broken. Diana, miffed, begins an equally sexless flirtation with Arthur's friend Charles. Arthur, wanting out of a situation of his own making, tries to pawn Annabel off on Charles, a gambit that works too well, leaving both Arthur and Diana dejected. Annabel ends up introducing Charles to her equally young friend, and they fall in love, the end of a chain of infatuations in which Charles and Clare are the only ones who actually end up sleeping together. I don't know if Doting is the best novel Green ever produced, but it's definitely the funniest, and the deflation of every grand affair is part of its charm. All this is brought full circle by the return of the Middleton son Peter, a whinging, juvenile pest who's blind to all the stormy drama that's been going on in his absence, and whose immaturity only underlines how icky the middle-aged men of the novel really are.

The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis

Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm. This was our birthright, this easy assurance that whatever we wanted was ours, both to have and to bestow. We knew nothing about privation and adventure, as Jee Moon liked to remind us. It was common knowledge Nanny had spoiled us rotten.

Kathryn Davis' The Silk Road begins with a yoga class at the end of the world. A set of siblings, known only by professional titles--the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Cook, the Iceman, the Geographer, the Keeper, the Topologist--have arrived here after a long journey on the Silk Road to get away from a rapidly spreading plague. The class is led by Jee Moon, a mysterious figure they've either just met or who has known them all their lives. When someone dies in the yoga class, it's not clear which one it is, but the grief of it complicates the safety of arrival, the safety of the arctic labyrinth.

The Silk Road is as close to Joy Williams' Harrow as anything else I've read. It operates at a high level of abstraction, in a world of myth and symbol rather than a world of logic or causality. Images of the quote-unquote normal word peek in, especially in flashbacks of the sibling's childhood in suburbia, but the Silk Road on which they walk is more like the Camino de Santiago, or the Stations of the Cross, a journey whose meaning unfolds as they walk it. The siblings enter a dreamy hospital, where one of them is seductively drawn further into the darkened rooms; is this a metaphor for death, loss, grief? Is it not enough that death haunts the end of things, does it have to haunt the journey, too?

Like Harrow (an unfair comparison, The Silk Road came first), cataclysm and disaster are what seem to have loosed the world from the grip of realism. For Williams, it's always ecological disaster; for Davis, it's a recurrence of the bubonic plague, complete with fleas, that gives the events of the novel, such as they are, a kind of medieval flair. (About six months after its publication, the first cruise ships were being quarantined after the appearance of a novel virus thought to have originated in China.) As the siblings flee, they must let go of their ideas about the world, just as they must let go of their ideas about themselves. Their titles cease to have any meaning (though it's not clear to what extent they ever did) as the journey across the Silk Road transforms them:

The thing is, he wasn't himself or what he thought of as himself, just as the farther we walked along the trail the less we knew of what we thought of as ourselves. It was disconcerting, our titles having been so deeply imprinted in us to become identities. The Cook hadn't cooked anything in a long time; the Iceman had abandoned his quest for permafrost. If the Archivist was going to turn into something like a fish, no one was going to find it strange. It was all right, as long as he eluded the lure.

I was bowled over by Davis' novel Labrador when I read it five years ago. I've been chasing that high ever since, and the results have been a couple of pretty good novels (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Versailles) and a couple that didn't really work (The Thin Place and The Walking Tour). The Silk Road is somewhere in the middle, but I haven't done it any favors by comparing it to Harrow, which strikes the balance between the real world and the symbolic one more effectively, in my opinion. But then again, it's one of Davis' strengths that the symbols and images of her novels often seem not to cohere into something usual or expected. That Davis can make you care about these characters, whose identities are so surface-level--and to open them up so the surface can be punctured--is really an achievement.

The Burnt Ones by Patrick White

At first it was impossible to believe their personal lives could be reduced by a shuffle of history, which is what happened, monetarily at least, on the deck of the destroyer, after the sack of their city. Because it had been personally theirs, which was now burning by bursts, and in long, funneling socks of smoke, and reflections of slow, oily light. As he ran looking for that other part of him which was lost, he gashed his shin on a companionway. But he did not know. Calling her name. None of that rabble of sufferers--wet, dry, singed, bleeding, deformed by the agony of their first historic situation--none of them knew any more, as they stood in their fashionable rags and watched their city burn.

My favorite story in Patrick White's collection The Burnt Ones is "Down at the Dump." Set in the suburban Sydney town of Sarsparilla, it tells the story of two young people finding an unexpected connection. One, a young girl, is at the cemetery for the funeral of her eccentric aunt. The other, a boy, is from a family of poor bogans who go searching for things to sell in the dump. It just happens that the cemetery and the dump are right next to each other, separated by only a fence, across which the two teens meet and connect, or not quite, and then over which they start making out. It's a perfect Patrick White story, about the rottenness and spoil beneath suburban gentility. There's a fantastic moment when the spirit of the dead aunt looks out over her mourners, symbolically mixing the spiritual realm with literal trash. And there may be no more setting where White is more at home than the dump, which he describes in his characteristic way: "At the last dip before the cemetery a disembowelled mattress from the dump had begun to writhe across the road. It looked like a kind of monster from out of the depths of somebody's mind, the part a decent person ignored."

About half the stories are set in Sarsparilla, about another half are set in Greece or are about ex-pat Greeks. The title The Burnt Ones refers to the Burning of Smyrna, a moment in which the Turkish regime set a massive fire to the Greek quarter of what is modern Izmir, killing tens of thousands. Nearly all of the Greeks in the novel experienced this, and it colors their experience of their new homes, whether in Greece, Australia, or America, and the immediacy of its horrors contrasts with the petty psychodramas of the collection's suburban Australians. Yet, we see too how easily the Greeks, having fled this "shuffle of history," are re-subsumed into polite schemata of respectability and repression. (White writes often about Greece and Greeks, presumably inspired by his longtime partner, a Greek named Manoly Lascaris.) My favorite of these stories was "Being Kind to Titina," about a boy who tortures an awkward young girl whom he has been instructed to be kind to. She grows up and, of course, turns out to be hot, and though she only remembers him as being kind, his own cruelty tortures and keeps him from being with her. It's a story that reminds you that White can be funny:

But Titina stuck. She stuck to me. It was as if Titina had been told. And once in the garden of our house at Schutz, after showing her my collection of insects, I became desperate. I took Titina's blue bead, and stuck it up her left nostril.

'Titina,' I cried, 'the holes of your nose are so big I'd expect to see your brain -- if you had any,' I shouted, 'inside.'

But Titina Stavridi only smiled, and sneezed the bead in to her hand.

Other stories I liked: "A Cheery Soul," about a woman who annoys everyone she comes in contact with; "Clay," about a boy whose mother worries about him being unusual--a bourgeois anxiety, of course, but then he turns out to be legitimately mad. And I especially liked "Miss Slattery and Her Demon Lover," about a young female door-to-door salesman who chucks everything for a slovenly Bulgarian she meets on her route, and who turns out to have a huge fetish for being whipped. I didn't think it was as strong, generally, as his other story collection The Cockatoos, though it's been many years since I've read that one. Sadly, I can see my stock of White's books dwindling--three leftover stories, a half-finished novel, and his memoirs are all I have left. 

A Fairly Good Time by Mavis Gallant

All her private dialogues were furnished with scraps of prose recited out of context, like the disparate chairs, carpets and lamps adrift in her apartment. She carried her notions of conversation into active life and felt as if she had been invited to act in a play without having been told the name of it. No one had ever mentioned who the author was or if the action was supposed to be sad or hilarious. She came on stage wondering whether the plot was gently falling apart or rushing onward toward a solution. Cues went unheeded and unrecognized, and she annoyed the other players by bringing in lines from any other piece she happened to recall.

Shirley Perrigny--formerly Shirley Norrington, then Shirley Higgins--is a Canadian living in Paris. Her first husband, Peter, died on their honeymoon in Italy, leaving her to drift toward France, where she married a journalist named Philippe. Philippe has left her, it seems, or half-left her; he has disappeared. Excuses seem to proliferate from the shadows--he's on assignment, he's visiting his family, he's sick with hepatitis--but each one is buttressed with the caveat that he's not to be contacted. Left adrift, Shirley searches for a sense of identity in the wake of these personal disasters. She makes friends with a desperate young mother named Claudie, and becomes reluctantly ingratiated with her family; Claudie sees in the slightly older Shirley someone who has her life together, which we know is the opposite of the truth. But Shirley's chief personality trait seems to be her need to care for others, which may be, as Philippe and others see it, a kind of self-abnegation that prevents Shirley from really becoming.

A Fairly Good Time is an example of a small but recognizable mid-century micro-genre: the North American girl in Europe. Mostly, as in Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, it's an American girl, but the Canadian Shirley is constantly being taken for an American anyway. Philippe, and many of the other locals, find many reasons to look down on Shirley; they take her personal idiosyncrasies to be examples of North American uncouthness, and they elevate small differences to the level of barbarism. It's really not a book that makes the French come out very well. But even among these, Shirley finds ways to  connect with people, even despite herself, and perhaps it is her outsider's perspective that makes her so invaluable to an unsettled soul like Claudie. Shirley, too, is adrift, but her adriftness has taken her far away from home, something that the too-young mother Claudie can only see and admire.

I've only read Gallant's short stories, and I love them, but I think that here, in a novel, the strengths that make her such a good short story writer work against her. Gallant's stories are rich and overfilled; they effortlessly give a sense of whole worlds that exist outside of the margins of the page. As a novel, it feels overstuffed; characters who might have made a strong singular impression, like Shirley's malicious landlady Madame Roux, end up overextended and obscure. Interestingly, I recognized the story of Shirley's first husband's death as being cribbed from one of her stories that, if I recall correctly, is anthologized in two of the collections I read. In that story, too, the young window drifts into the first harbor she can find, a lover and his family who turn out to be somewhat sinister.

This NYRB edition of A Fairly Good Time includes another of Gallant's novels (maybe the only other one, but I'm not looking it up; don't quote me), Green Water, Green Sky. This novel--really, a novella--is about Flor, another Canadian in Europe (as Gallant herself was), undergoing the slow dissolution of her mental health. Flor's story is told mostly through the eyes of the people at the edges of her life, some intimate and others quite incidental: her mother, her Jewish husband Bob Harris, her cousin George, an artist and hanger-on named Wishart. This method is strange, and it felt to me like the novel keeps us from looking directly at Flor. It's too disparate, too imbalanced, to work with any kind of wholeness or singleness, though perhaps the fragmentation is much the point. And yet, a long scene where Flor, abandoned by her mother and others, cloisters herself within her flat and begins to break down completely, shows Gallant, like nothing else in either novel does, at the height of her talents.

Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather and Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor

He happened to be engaged in work of public utility, but he was not willing to become what is called a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he he had determined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which confronted him, -- of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was like being buried alive.

Bartley Alexander is a renowned builder of bridges. He's hard at work on a bridge in Canada that will be the world's longest cantilever bridge, and his reputation has made him a public figure of know-how and enterprise. He's married to an elegant, pragmatic woman named Winifred, but on a trip to London, he reconnects with a spirited Irish actress named Hilda, whom he threw over to marry his now-wife. Meeting her again reignites his passion, and soon they are in the throws of a love affair that sunders Bartley's personality between the private and the public, and threatens to destroy him.

Alexander's Bridge was Cather's first novel. It was followed less than a year later by a masterpiece, O Pioneers!; Alexander's Bridge is not a masterpiece. It wears its debt to Henry James openly on its sleeve, but Cather was never a very Jamesian writer. James might have worked out the psychology of Bartley's affair to the most minute detail, but Cather's writing is all wrong for intricacy. Her characters are too plainspoken, to us and to themselves; there's not many shades of sentiment or feeling. Cather tends to say one thing and to say it well. It's perhaps unfair to think of it this way, but it's why she's so much more talented at capturing the life of a Nebraska homesteader, whose life, like her prose, is made up of the most simple things in delicate and meaningful arrangement. The Boston-to-London life of Bartley Alexander makes more room for a Jamesian artifice that Cather seems to think she's interested in, but isn't.

The novel ends--spoiler--with the collapse of the record-breaking bridge in Canada. Bartley has had to skimp on materials to meet the cost demands of his benefactors, but there's no way to test whether they'll hold until the bridge is built. They don't, and Bartley is drowned in the collapse of his greatest achievement. This ending really is beneath the writer that Cather would become: pointedly symbolic, but not really integrated with character or plot. The bridge collapses because Bartley collapses, riven by his double life, but this image is too easy and too predictable to really work.

That the novel of manners was not her metier she had to learn the hard way, by writing one. Alexander's Bridge is a case of borrowed finery, as she felt almost immediately on its completion. Still, reading it today one fids much to admire in the book's tragic love triangle.... One cannot help suspecting Cather was here expressing the divided state of her own personal life, split as it was between two women, Isabelle and Edith. This cannot be demonstrated; I only propose it here as a possibility.

In his biography of Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas, Benjamin Taylor describes Alexander's Bridge as a failure that Cather was aware of. She was pushing forty; to have her first novel as an artistic failure might have scared her off forever. Thank God she kept on writing and produced O Pioneers!. Taylor's book marches dutifully through Cather's life from book to book and story to story, and its clear that the author is a passionate fan who loves the texts about which he's writing. The book--which is very short for a biography--lingers most leisurely when discussing the books themselves. Much of the book is taken up with unpacking the tone and quality of the books' reviews--which were deemed a success, which a failure, etc., etc.

All that, I thought, comes at the cost of never really dipping too far past the surface of Cather's life. We get the fascinating tidbit, which I did not know, that Cather's lifelong "companion" Edith Lewis was actually her second love, after a woman named Isabelle McClung who broke Cather's heart by marrying. What her compensatory relationship with Edith was like is barely touched upon here. Perhaps there's little way to know what went on in this "Boston marriage," but Cather and her writing are too much the focus here to really admit anyone else. Like Cather's novels, the biography is made up of simple stuff delicately arranged, but like all homages and imitations, it pales against the quality of the master.

Chasing Homer by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I lost this book somewhere after finishing it. It's an appropriate fate, maybe. The narrator of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Chasing Homer is constantly trying to disappear. We know nothing about him, not his name or nationality or age; all we know is that he's being chased. We don't know who's chasing him; he doesn't even seem to know who's chasing him, or even what they look like. He only knows that if they find him, they will kill him brutally. It seems beside the point to ask whether these pursuers are real, because it's a question with no relevance to the fear and panic that are the subject of the book. The narrator can't even stop to determine whether they are real. He must keep moving at all times. Time narrows; for him there is only the present moment, and the self narrows too, down to its barest and most animal elements.

The narrator moves vaguely south through Europe. He boards ferries that travel along the Adriatic coast. (It's not hard to imagine him moving due southwest from Krasznahorkai's native Hungary.) On one such ferry, he overhears a local berating a Japanese tourist couple about visiting a beautiful and secluded island. The local whips out a copy of The Odyssey and begins reading. This island, we quickly intuit, is supposedly the island of Calypso, where Odysseus himself was waylaid for years before his final push home to Ithaca. The narrator decides desperately to make his way there, imagining that Calypso's island might be his last chance to shake his pursuers. There's a funny reversal here. For Odysseus, Calypso's island was a trap, a distraction that kept him from getting home, but the narrator of Chasing Homer has no home. To be eternally waylaid, suspended, is the best he can imagine. The island represents, perhaps, the pause in the plot, the interruption of the forward motion of events that leads inexorably to death.

I thought this was fine. It struck me as very Beckett. It's the kind of book that seeks to capture a very singular feeling, and it does that very well. It eschews the realistic-literary belief that feelings should be incarnated in specific stories. At the same time, like the best of the "brodernist" writers, it winks at genre fiction tropes that have already become a little outdated. Chasing Homer is a kind of thriller, pared down to its barest essence--just as the narrator is pared down to his barest essence. It's a multimedia project that's interspersed with illustrations by artist Max Neumann. These illustrations are sketchy and flat, made of half-erased pencil lines and fields of thick black that capture the novel's reduction of the human. It's accompanied, too, by a music score by Miklos Szilveszter accessed by QR code that I haven't listened to because I lost the book. I thought the illustrations were also fine.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Panic jumped down on Geryon at three a.m. He stood at the window of his hotel room
Empty street below gave back nothing of self.
Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street.
Little rackety wind went by.
Moon gone. Sky shut. Night had delved deep. Somewhere (he thought) beneath
this strip of sleeping pavement
the enormous solid globe is spinning on its way--pistons thumping, lava pouring
from shelf to shelf,
evidence and time lignifying into their traces. At what point does one say of a man
that he has become unreal?

Geryon is a terrible red monster of myth, who was killed by Herakles in one of his famous labors. In Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, he's also a young gay man, growing up with a mother who loves him but who cannot protect him from the sexual predations of his brother. Herakles--whom we know is Geryon's murderer--becomes, in Carson's telling, a charismatic young lover who will end up breaking Geryon's heart. All this is told in a "novel of verse," in a loping alternation of short and long lines that seems something like an awkward gait, perhaps the discomfortable rhythm of a young man who feels he is a monster.

Carson puts Geryon on a backpacking trip to South America, where he reconnects with Herakles in Buenos Aires, along with a kinder and more insightful man named Ancash, a Quechua-speaking Peruvian who forms a third point in this new love triangle. Together, the trio go off to Peru and the town of the flank of the volcano where Ancash is from. It's strongly suggested that Geryon's red skin makes him an associate of the volcano, perhaps even that a volcano somewhere in history or time has produced his red skin, and Carson quotes liberally from some of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, where she uses the volcano as a metaphor for the kind of rich inner turmoil that marks the human condition. Maybe that's it; maybe Geryon wears his turmoil on the outside. Maybe we all feel we wear our turmoil on the outside from time to time. I was expecting the story to end like the myth, with the literal death by Geryon at the hands of Herakles, but the ending is much more ambiguous, with the trio stopping to witness a bakery built into the side of the volcano to use the natural heat. Geryon is slain, perhaps, but not in the way we were expecting, and not in the way that the ancient Greek Stesichorus wrote.

Honestly, I thought this was fine. I thought the slippage between the monster and the man was well-done, but not exactly all that illuminating. The doubling up between realism and myth felt to me like an attempt to make a whole out of two two-spare parts, as did the doubling up between the narrative and the poetry, neither of which felt wholly convincing or wholly successful to me. Perhaps a more patient study would reveal more; after all, we're not really acculturated for novels in verse anymore, and that Carson made a popular work out of one in our day and age really is something of a miracle. 

The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai

There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way that they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

Japan, just after the end of the second World War. Kazuko is a young aristocrat in a world where the aristocracy has lost all meaning and prestige. Her father has recently collapsed and died, and her mother is increasingly ill. They are forced to move from Tokyo to the countryside, as if disappearing into the  wilderness. Her mother, though she retains in Kazuko's eyes the qualities of bearing and gentility that once marked the upper classes, seems to belong to yesterday's world, and her illness is a token of that world's vanishing. Meanwhile, her brother Naoji--their mother's favorite--reacts to the diminishment of the family's prestige by getting into alcohol and drugs. It's not that they are ashamed, really, only that each of them--Kazuko, mother, Naoji--feels increasingly ancillary in this Japan, which is already itself so transformed and diminished from what it had been.

Kazuko clings to her mother, desperate to keep the family intact as well as she can. At the same time, she has become obsessed with a dissolute artist and friend of her brother's named Uehara. Uehara is from another class entirely, and her relation to him is not so different from Naoji's; both attach themselves to the world that Uehara represents because they want to flee their own. More accurately, perhaps, Kazuko wishes to betray her class; by choosing Uehara, she turns her back on a life that only promises for her further vanishing and death. Her letters to Uehara go mostly unanswered until she hunts him down and spends a wholly unsatisfying, even repulsive, night with him. In her letters, she calls him "M. C."--my child, my comedian, even my Chekhov. Interestingly, Kazuko's cultural references all seem to be quite Western. She loves Chekhov and Shakespeare; she knows her Bible inside and out. Is it a sign of outwardness, of the noble class searching outside the world that has given it power and prestige for an intact culture? Or is it a sign of a cultural exchange that belongs to an older period, and was obliterated by the rise of Japanese nationalism and the war?

When--spoiler alert--Kazuko's mother dies of tuberculosis, everything falls apart. Naoji commits suicide, writing to Kazuko that his love for his mother was the only thing keeping him from doing it before. (His love for Kazuko, we understand, is not quite strong enough--or, rather, Naoji correctly intuits that Kazuko is strong enough, if only by bare inches, not to follow him into the grave.) Interestingly, this reflects something that Kazuko's mother had said after the death of her father and the retreat into the countryside: if not for Kazuko and Naoji, she simply would have stayed put, and died. It's easy to imagine the fragile family as a house of cards, where the removal of one sends the whole edifice tumbling. The title, The Setting Sun, is clearly in ironic contrast to Japan's identity as the "Land of the  Rising Sun," and it captures quite painfully an entire generation and class who feel at the very end of existence, for whom there is no tomorrow. Kazuko finds a small bit of hope in reading the writings of Rosa Luxemburg--again, looking to the West--whose fervor for revolution get mixed up with her attempt to ingratiate herself with Uehara. We get the sense that revolution and renewal are not to be found there--but neither, I think, does the book close the door on them completely. Whatever hope there is in the novel didn't keep Dazai from committing suicide a few years after the book's publication.

To Hell With Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova

She put the pieces of dry dung into the sack, brought it to the house, opened the wood stove door, and emptied the sack into the firebox. My siblings and I had gathered the dung over the summer, often getting into fights with other kids. There was a story behind each piece of that dung. That thin whitish piece, dipped in diesel to make it ignite at once, had been produced by the cow with a broken horn that belonged to our neighbor Qambar. After finding old Qambar's cow eating the hay saved for our own cows, I chased it away, telling, "Botflies on you and blackleg too!" and every other curse I knew. When the wet flop she'd dropped as she walked away dried up in the sun, I picked it up and placed it against the wall of our cow pen. Yes, each piece of dung had a story like that.

In "The Black Colt," the story that opens Kazakh writer Baqytgul Sarmekova's collection To Hell With Poets, a man arranges a wedding for a longtime local bachelor, for which he is paid a fine black horse. He's never owned a horse before, but it becomes his pride and joy; no longer does he care for his many cows. But when the bachelor dies before the wedding, his brother comes to reclaim the horse. When the man demands the cost he paid in keeping the horse, he's paid by the brother--in horse feed. It's these little ironies, the kind that might happen all over the auls of the Kazakh steppe outside of where most literary eyes can see, that are the subject of To Hell With Poets.

An aul is a kind of fortified hillside village, as I understand it. Sarmekova's collection, which is more a collection of character sketches or vignettes than a collection of short stories, I think, goes back and forth from the aul to the city, whether Almaty or Astana, and the tension between the two is often at the book's center. The title story is about a naive young girl from the aul who dreams of being a poet (her poem is pretty good: "There's life in you, hard-shell egg. / Make the most of it. / In a moment, I'll smash you to pieces. / I'll have you over easy.") and who becomes caught in the whirlwind attentions of an older male poet from the city. Their tryst disillusions her from pursuing poetry; in a post-script, she has become a successful urban woman when she recognizes the former poet as her taxi-driver. The despair, the sense of inadequacy--which, it must be said, cannot entirely be blamed on the poet in the first story, whose attentions seemed genuine enough--are flipped around. The poet-taxi-driver looks at the now elegant woman, who is flipping him off, and thinks, "How could a fingernail be this long? Bright-red, as though dipped in blood, and pointed like a spear, the fingernail seemed to pierce his heart."

Overall, both book and stories have a slightness that prevents them from being truly memorable. But I appreciate the way they never try to do too much; "The Black Colt" is, even with its simple one-two-three plot, the most complex of them. Taken together, they offer a really fascinating glimpse into the tensions and contradictions of modern life in Kazakhstan. Which, by the way: with the addition of Kazakhstan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 104! I have to say, I really appreciate the work of Tilted Axis Press, which goes to such lengths to find translated literature from places not usually represented on American bookshelves.

Paradais by Fernanda Melchor

Polo never told fatboy anything during their drinking sessions; he never shared what he really thought of him or his ridiculous fantasies about Señora Marian, at least not in the beginning, during their first meetings down by the dock, when fatboy would get hammered and spend hours telling Polo whatever filthy shit went through his head, sparing no details and without a hint of embarrassment: about the porn he watched and how many times a day he masturbated, or the things he'd do to Señora Marian when he finally got his hands on her, by whatever means necessary, while Polo just nodded and chuckled along and shiftily downed three quarters of the bottle of rum that fatboy had paid for, humoring the fat prick but never opening his mouth unless it was to drink from his plastic cup or exhale his cigarette smoke up into the sky to chase away the mosquitoes that swarmed in vertiginous clouds above their heads, occasionally nodding to give fatboy the impression that he was listening to him, that he "got" him, and that he wasn't just there for the handouts, right?

Polo works as a groundskeeper for a luxury condominium in Progreso, a seaside town on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. He lives across the lagoon--supposedly haunted by the ghost of a sinister doña--with his mother and cousin Zorayda, who tortures him with sexual aggressions. The only friend he's ever had, his cousin Milton, has recently left, recruited against his will into the schemes of the cartel. In a long reported story, Milton tells Polo the gruesome ordeal of his own kidnapping, and of being forced to murder at the cartel's bidding, and yet Polo can only see the story as offering a kind of escape from the dreariness and poverty of his own life. At Paradais, he befriends Franco, the filthy-minded son of a wealthier family, though secretly Polo despises him and thinks of him as "fatboy." Franco/Fatboy is obsessed with Señora Marian, an elegant neighbor, and is constantly describing his own lurid fantasies of kidnapping and rape. Between the two of them--the desperate Polo and the sinister Franco--the fantasies inch closer and closer to becoming a real plan.

Paradais is the story of how a terrible crime comes about. Polo and Franco are quite different, both in temperament and status, and yet they both become invested in realizing Franco's bloody, predatory fantasies. Franco could never be a point-of-view character; he's poisoned by his relative affluence to the point of desensitization. We get the sense that life is not much different to him than a video game, or a video on the pornography websites he spends most of his time on. It's harder to understand, on the other hand, why Polo participates. He hates Franco, and despises his fantasies, and yet they come to represent for him a lashing out against the forces that have conspired to place in in poverty and immobility: his cruel mother, his lascivious cousin, his abandonment by Milton, his tyrannical boss, and especially the moneyed residents of Paradais, whose freedom over their own lives Polo recognizes as something he can never have. Polo is a teenager, and we can see easily that his desperation and resentment are stronger than the reasoning centers of his brain. Yet, beyond the misfortune of his station, Melchor does very little to make him an appealing or sympathetic character. There's no heart of gold here, just nastiness and despair.

Paradais is a dispiriting read. It's bleak, it's seedy, it's sordid. It makes you feel like taking a shower. You pray that something will happen to derail the horrible denouement, but it never does--that would be too literary, too easy. It's effective in its portrayal of the anger and resentment produced in those who think they have no escape from their own poverty, or the simple tedium of a life without the benefits of wealth. And yet I felt at the end of it that it hadn't quite justified, or found something revelatory, in its own sheer ugliness. I finished reading it in the emergency room, and boy, that felt bad. But you can't say it doesn't do exactly what it wants to do, as unremittingly awful as that might be.

A Heart So White by Javier Marias

("Listening is the most dangerous thing of all," I thought, "listening means knowing, finding out, knowing everything there is to know, ears don't have lids that can close against the words uttered, they can't hide from what they sense they're about to hear, it's always too late. Now we know and it may well stain our hearts so white, or are our hearts merely pale or fearful or cowardly?")

Juan is a contemporaneous translator, working to facilitate communication between politicians and government officials. But he knows, too, that communication, the revelation of the inner thought, is no simple matter, and that the difficulty of translation is predicated on the difficulty of ever successfully saying what is true: "Sometimes," Marias writes, "I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered." On his wedding day to another translator, Luisa, Juan's father Ranz--a rakish art dealer with connections to known forgers--give him a piece of advice: never tell your wife your secrets. Of course, no one says this if they don't have secrets themselves, and Juan goes on to uncover, somewhat reluctantly and with Luisa's help, the secrets of his father. These secrets have to do with his three marriages, and the suicide of his second wife--shockingly depicted in the novel's foreword--who was the sister to his third, Juan's mother. 

This secret, and its unveiling, form the spine of the novel. You can see the influence of detective fiction on Marias; there's scenes of following and watching from afar, though unlike detective fiction, it's never clear what these stakeouts accomplish. In a detective novel, the revelation of the killer results in their arrest and conviction, but here, the only victory is the truth being known, and as Marias writes, that's a more equivocal victory than it may seem. But what interested me most about the novel were the various scenes and mysteries that crowd around this "central" mystery, ones that are never really resolved. On their honeymoon, Juan and Luisa overhear a man in an adjoining Havana hotel room agree with his lover to kill his wife. In New York, Juan helps a fellow translator and friend arrange a tryst with a mysterious video-date who makes increasingly lurid demands. Juan even has an inkling that this man and the one in Havana may be the same--which would be a shocking coincidence, but not one that's unheard of in the cheap paperbacks the novel is riffing on--but this inkling goes nowhere. The date happens, and Juan's friend clams up; she's gotten what she wants, and nothing is left to be revealed. Nor do we ever find out if the man from Havana ever really killed his wife, or intended to.

It's these scenes that give the novel its satisfyingly unsettled nature. Oddly, the central mystery is revealed quite clearly in due time, but we leave the novel with a sense that we have learned very little, that the "whole story" is not out there to be found. I also really liked all the material about the father's life as a dealer in art forgeries, which you think is going to be part of the grand mystery, but which isn't. I loved the story about Ranz, walking through the Prado, seeing a security guard about to take a lighter to a Renaissance painting. He's grown sick seeing the scene every day, how it never changes, how the characters in the margins never seem to reveal themselves. It's an image, maybe, of that hope that things will be revealed, and that revelation will put things right; it's also just a great scene on its own, and something that I myself was thinking about--oddly enough--as I toured the Prado on my trip to Spain. How crazy it must drive those guards to sit there every day and stare at the same art, even the most celebrated art in the world! Oh, or maybe, it's an image that shows us that even normal people, driven to extremes by the most ordinary mechanisms of time and life, will from time to time give into their most violent impulses.

Ornament of the World by Rosa Maria Menocal

The old Arabic word for palace, al-qasr, was what the Castilians called their splendid new royal homes. The elaborate plasterwork that decorated nearly every inch of the Alcazar's interior walls was barely dry, and the Muslim emissary from Granada found himself in rooms that in every way echoed the freshly finished palaces of this Islamic city he had just left. Peter, a son of Alfonso XI and the heir to his great-great-grandfather Alfonso X (the Learned), who had died in this city, was justifiably proud of this example of his wealth, taste, and vision. All three were on display in this Sevillian tribute to the very latest architectural style of Spain. Ibn Khaldun could hardly have avoided the realization that Peter's new palaces, with their multilobed latticework arches and their pure-white arabesque ornamentation on every spare surface, were an unstinting homage to the style of the Nasrids, whose envoy he was. There, on the open and sunny plain, sitting next to the giant old Almohad mosque in Seville--the mosque had been reconsecrated more than a hundred years before and was the cathedral of the Christian capital--was an unabashed evocation of the fortlike palaces at the top of the rocky mountain retreat of Granada, the last and lonely Islamic state on the Iberian peninsula.

I had the great fortune last week to visit two of Spain's most striking and important landmarks: the Alcazar of Spain, a royal palace that is still the sometime home of the King and his family, and the Alhambra, an enormous palace complex built by the Muslim Nasrids of Granada. The Alcazar is a Christian edifice, done in what's known as the "Mudejar" style, meaning Christian architecture with Muslim edifices. It really does look a lot like the Alhambra, and visiting the two, someone who didn't know exactly what to look for might get the impression that they were built by the same people for the same purposes. The two structures are, to author Maria Rosa Menocal, powerful symbols of one of history's true golden eras: medieval Spain, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews existed side by side in a culture of tolerance and cultural exchange. A Christian ruler might, even after the reconquest of much of the Iberian peninsula, in which Muslim rule in Spain was shrunken down to just the city-state of Granada, recognize Islamic art and culture as part of his own powerful patrimony, and built a palace worthy of such creative and intellectual forebears.

Menocal frames her book as a series of biographical sketches of figures who typified the 750-year-ish era that constituted the golden age of al-Andalus. Among them are Samuel the Nagid, an influential Jewish poet and leader who served as a general in Muslim Granada; prolific Islamic writers like Ibn Hazm and Averroes; the Christian warrior known as El Cid; even apostates who rejected the world of philosophical tolerance like Jewish thinker Judah Halevi. This format made it a little hard to grasp some of the overarching historical narratives at play, but I think I more or less got the gist: survivors of the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in Baghdad arrived in al-Andalus around 750 CE, where they created a Muslim state centered on Cordoba that incorporated Christians and Jews but also cemented Arabic as the primary language of both knowledge and art. These Umayyads were eventually conquered by a pair of strict invading Islamic states, the Almohads and Almoravids, who were supplanted by a system of individual city-states known as taifas. The taifas lasted until the reconquest, ending with the loss of Granada and the edict of Isabella and Ferdinand--a pair of history's great villains, no doubt--expelling the Jews from Spain, cementing the entire peninsula as a Christian polity.

I had a vague idea, of course, that Muslim thinkers protected and progressed the traditions of Greek philosophy during the time that much of these sources were lost to Christian Europe. What I didn't know is just how much of that happened in Spain. It was Averroes, the Latinized name of Ibn Rushd, for example, whose commentaries on Aristotle kept the Greek philosopher's legacy alive, later to be integrated into the Christian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Nor did I realize that Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales has its roots in the writings of Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish convert from Judaism to Christianity, whose "Priestly Tales" held little interest for his own countrymen but which Englishmen had never seen. Nor had I ever really thought about the fact that, as must be true, even the Jewish and Christian thinkers of the time period wrote in Arabic, a language that had come to supplant Latin as a lingua franca. Even the great Jewish writer Maimonides, for example, wrote his commentaries on the Mishna in Arabic. One of the great, perhaps even tragic, turning points for Menocal, is when King Alfonso the Wise chooses to elevate the vernacular romance language of Castile to official status.

It's clear that Menocal sees the story, or perhaps stories, of medieval al-Andalus as not just history, but a model for the way society could be. A postscript notes that she finished the book shortly after 9/11, when the book's pleas for tolerance--especially in relation to the contributions of Muslim and Arabic thinkers--became especially ignored, and especially needed. As Menocal shows, much of the great philosophy, poetry, art, and architecture--the Alcazar of Seville and Alhambra of Grenada among them--were only able to exist because a culture of tolerance and free exchange allowed them to exist. 25 years later, it's hard to see that a society like this remains a probability for us, though the book shows quite effectively that such worlds are possible.

The Hive by Camilo Jose Cela

The morning arrives, step by step, crawling like a worm over the hearts of the men and women in the city; it beats, almost tenderly, against eyes that have just opened, eyes that will never see new horizons, new landscapes, new environments.

The morning, the same morning over and over again, plays its little games, of course, changes the face of the city: that tomb, that greasy pole, that hive...

Lord, have mercy!

Camilo Jose Cela's novel The Hive begins with Doña Rosa, the proprietress of a cafe in Madrid after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Doña Rosa is a tyrant, abusing her workers and her patrons alike, but her brutishness seems to have no effect on the success of her cafe, which is constantly filled with the lonely, the miserable, and the poor, using what change they've been able to scrounge to buy a coffee (but not, to Doña Rosa's dismay and anger, any of the available pastries). From there, the story moves outward, into the lives of the patrons, and branching off of them in patterns that resemble a network of nerves as much as it does the insect hive of the title. The Hive has, it is said, over three hundred characters, some of whom have the same or similar names, and some of whom have no names at all; it's impossible to tell, at first glance, who will be really important to the novel, and who is shuffled onto the stage to provide a single and singular image--like the young suicide who throws himself out the window because the room smells too strongly of onions--and who will end up as a recurring character.

I'd be lying if I said I followed the novel all too well. It's the first book I read on my new Kindle, which I got for traveling, and which I feel like puts up a kind of mental-physical barrier--I could not easily, for instance, riffle through the page to find a character's first appearance. But it did allow me the ease of reading the novel in Madrid, who you might say--imagine!--is the real protagonist of The Hive, a city of the poor and beleaguered having just emerged from Civil War, and not into liberation, but an oppression that will last decades. (No surprise that Doña Rosa, unlike many of her Bohemian clients, is an ardent Francoist.) More appropriately, it might be said that the protagonist is one Martin Marco, a penniless leftist poet who is unable to pay his tab at the cafe, who lives on the equivalent of a friend's couch, and who spends his days wandering the city doing nothing but feeling deeply.

Perhaps in the wake of Franco's victory there were many who felt like Marco, whose passion and sensitivity had no outlet for action, while the brutality and the tyranny of someone like Doña Rosa turned out to be the order of the day. (It's a stretch, but there's something in the the parallel between the proprietress' Francoism and her cruelty that reminds of the way certain people are reveling in the permission now granted them by political circumstance to treat others cruelly.) But Marco is only one character, and the position of the novel seems to be that life goes on no matter what the circumstances, that different days, different political orders, have little effect on the sum totality of human activity, which adds up to something rather tedious and sordid. There's Elvira, the sad, aging prostitute; there's the young girl who goes into prostitution to earn money for her boyfriend's tuberculosis medicine; there's blackmail and cross-blackmail; there's the murder of a local woman with a terrycloth towel that turns out to be--though who has any way of knowing this?--instrumental to the conclusion of the novel's plot, such as it is. I've not mentioned several hundred characters, and those that I have I probably haven't got quite right; but I'm not sure that The Hive is a novel to be diagrammed. It's something you're supposed to hold up to your ear, and listen to the buzz.

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

The feeling of ending was the feeling of a new season. My complexion changed, and birthmarks that had gone into permanent hibernation once again rose to the surface. I was suddenly famished. The house unfolded around me like a paper swan laid flat and the spring air came rushing across my shoulders, and I knew the job was complete. I know this isn't how houses work, but this is how it felt, and it's the only way the memory exists for me now. I packed my leather planner, soon to overflow with meetings, interviews, endless interviews. I collected the envelope of payment from the mailbox at the end of the driveway, closed the front door one final time, and went off to claim my palimpsest career.

The narrator of Hilary Leichter's Temporary is just that, a temp. She fills in for all sorts of jobs: Chairman of the Board, pirate, bank robber, murderer, pamphlet-deliverer, human barnacle. In this strange world, as perhaps in ours, to be a temp is to live in a strange kind of limbo where your existence is never your own. Our narrator's mother was a temp, also, and took her daughter to her first job, opening and closing the doors of a strange house on a particular schedule--an eerie job that turns out to be filling in for a ghost. The narrator yearns to be made a "permanent," that is, to find a permanent job, and thus a permanent identity, a permanent self, something that perhaps happens to temps, but only rarely. Even her love life has a kind of indeterminate status; while she's out filling in for pirates and murderers, all of her various boyfriends (the tallest boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the favorite boyfriend) are convening in her house and growing closer. To choose from them, we perceive, would be the kind of thing that a permanent can do.

Temporary is a kind of book that you recognize well enough once you see its basic design: take one of the metaphors or cliches that underline our lives and elevate them to literalness. It's the same basic logic, though a very different book, as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, and it succeeds for the same reason that Whitehead doesn't, because it throws itself into the schtick with gusto, and runs gleefully away from any question of realism or internal consistency. Leichter's workscape is a caricature universe, but the image of labor is a very real one. It captures our gig economy world, where so much labor is temporary, and where the promise of a good, steady, and permanent job--the kind my grandfather had from the time he graduated on the G.I. Bill to his retirement--has become entirely elusive. It's funny, I don't think temps exist anymore, or if they do, the cultural niche they occupy in the cubicle world (Ryan on The Office, for example) has become much muted. But we're all temps now. (Except, not me--I'm union.) More than this, Leichter builds upon the literalized metaphor to illuminate how destabilizing the constant ebb and flow of life's changes can be, and how difficult it can be to establish anything that feels like steadiness and reliability, in work or love, or anything else.

Temporary is 180 pages long; still, sometimes, it felt to me like she was stretching the idea a little too thin. But I wouldn't want to let that detract from the whirlwind imagination it took to make it work to the extent it does, and how what might have been a one-note idea is constantly refreshed and renewed. I loved the moment, for example, when a fellow temp on the pirate ship takes captive a woman who turns out to be the one for whom she's filling in. The violent reaction from the temp shows just how cutthroat you might turn out to be when face-to-face with your own life's competition. I liked the man filling in for the parrot, and I liked how the narrator is accompanied by the ghost of the Chairman of the Board, whose ashes she's been tasked with keeping talisman-like around her neck. Some of the jokes land flat, but most of them just land. And in the end, it made me feel how powerfully precarious life in this modern world can be, and how there is a small voice in the back of all our minds reminding us how easily we might be replaced.

Christendom by Peter Heather

Christendom, then, is a response to what seems to me the pressing intellectual challenge of reassessing Christianity's rise to pre-eminence in the light of its modern eclipse, by re-examining the historical processes that first generated the defining coincidence between Europe and the cultural dominance of the Christian religion. It aims to give full weight to contingency, to Christianity's almost limitless capacity for self-reinvention, and to the potential of past populations to have made alternative choices. My aim here is not to produce another total history of Christianity, but to explore afresh exactly how Europe became Christendom: that part of the planet dominated by Christian rulers and overwhelmingly Christian populations.

Peter Heather takes two points in European history as the beginning and end of Christendom, his massive history of the growth of the Christian religion throughout Europe: first, the 4th century conversion of Constantine, which brought official Christianity to the Roman Empire for the first time, and then the 14th century conversion of the Lithuanians, the last major polity in Europe to be Christianized. It took about a thousand years, then, for Christianity to conquer the continent, which seems like a long time, but maybe isn't so much when you consider what historical undertakings must have taken place for a single continent to become so religiously homogenous. What happened in between is the subject of Heather's book.

One of the main theses of Christendom is that Christianity's rise was not foreordained. Before Christianity began to wane as a social force in Europe, Heather explains, it was easy to look at the religion's success and determine that it was simply built different. Now, in a post-Christian era, it's easier to appreciate how things might have been otherwise, and Heather shows us meticulously how this was true: Constantine's conversion, for example, eventually drew in much of the landowning Roman elite, but left the pagan public untouched, requiring an early medieval campaign of temple-busting to spread throughout the Eastern empire. The orthodox Nicene Christianity that we take for granted today was closer, Heather argues, to being defeated by its rivals than we really appreciate; the Gothic successor states of the Roman Empire were split between different forms of Christianity that might easily have led to vastly historical paths. And of course, Heather reminds us, Christianity's traditional strongholds in the Near East and North Africa were swallowed wholesale by Islam in a process of elite capture that remarkably resembled the rise of Christianity among the same groups; if Islam could capture the places where Christianity was born, why not the rest of Europe? Heather calls this contingency, and an awareness of the way things might have been different alerts us to the fact that history is made up of positive actors, not merely those swept up in inevitable tides of change.

Christianity thrived, Heather argues, because of its adaptability. The Christianity adopted by Constantine and the Roman elite was not much like the rusticism of the Desert Fathers and the Jesus Movement of early Palestine. Roman intellectual and literary traditions helped provide an infrastructure for a Christian empire, which all but fell apart after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, giving way to a collection of largely autonomous communities held loosely together by missionary and monastic traditions. In the middle of the middle ages--say, 600 to 1100--most Europeans would not have gone to church regularly, and only a few would have been exposed to regular preaching. Religious authority lay not in the pope but in divinely appointed kings--especially the Carolingians, whose strong hand and interest in religious control did much to resurrect Christianity as an institutional practice--who used it as a tool to build alliances and cement their own legitimacy. The end of Heather's story begins with the "Twelfth Century Renaissance" and the gradual assertion of the papacy as a singular Christian authority, which mutually reinforced a set of social institutions that renewed a particular orthodoxy. It's interesting to reflect on how young the idea of papal supremacy is, and certain associated theological positions, like notions of sin, penitence, and purgatory, which only come into their own alongside the rise of the Holy See. When the Lithuanians completed the puzzle of European Christianity, Heather argues, they did so in the context of an institutional Christianity that was much stronger than it had been since the days of Constantine, and which looked much different even from the Christianity of a century or two before.

I really enjoyed reading this. Even as a relatively curious and knowledgeable person (I hope), the long middle ages really seem like a single mashed up period to me. It's hard to conceptualize a period in which, say, Charlemagne and St. Francis are as far apart as me and George Washington, and even this is is only a fraction of the long history of Christianity's growth to the ends of the continent. It confirmed for me something I long suspected: that today's "trads" are largely bullshit artists who have no idea, or perhaps simply no interest, in whether or not the traditions they seem to value actually represent unbroken strands of Christian practice at all. Christianity's adaptability, we see, is its great strength, but it also means that there is and was an immense diversity as to what the religion meant in both concept and practice.  

Chess Story by Stefan Zwieg

From my own experience I was well aware of the mysterious attraction of the "royal game," which, alone among the games devised by man, regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift. But is it not already an insult toc all chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all people and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?

Chess Story tells about a single chess match between masters of the game, held on a transatlantic passenger ship. On one side is Mirko Czentovic, a Slavic savant and world champion whose abilities at the board are belied by his inability to understand the game without said board in front of him. On the other side is Dr. B, whose skills, by contrast, are wholly imaginary: as he tells the narrator, he was held for months, perhaps years, in a hotel room by the Nazis with only a chess instruction book to entertain himself. When he came to the end of it, he began to play chess against himself in his mind. The game he is to play against Czentovic will be the first game of real chess he's ever played in decades, and the first real opponent.

Chess Story is a novel about the Nazis, for one, the way they tried not only to eliminate the lives and livelihoods of their victims, but also their intellectual and imaginary capacity. Dr. B's mental chess game is a way of defeating his captors, and chess turns out to be the perfect tool, discrete but endlessly variable, so that the possibilities never end. But playing against himself turns out to have had deleterious effects on Dr. B's mind. He tells the narrator that he essentially had to create two selves, a black self and a white self, and isolate them from each other so strongly in his mind that each was forced to guess at the strategy of the other, as one would a real chess opponent. Mirko, who turns out to be not such an idiot about everything but the chess board, cannily sees that his opponent is playing every game but the one on the table, and adjusts his strategy accordingly. So, it's about the Nazis, but it's also about the mind, and whether the mind is really all-powerful, or whether it tends toward dissolution in the absence of the practical and the real.

This one felt a little like cheating. At 80 pages, it really is a Chess Story and not a Chess Novel. It has a short story's singularity of impact, and it felt to me even more streamlined and singular than a novella might. And yet, here it is between two covers. I enjoyed the small and colorfully drawn cast of characters; I think the novel works because while Dr. B is at the novel's heart, Mirko is just as interesting, and so are some of the other characters, like the braggart Scottish industrialist who can't let himself lose even to the undisputed world champion. If you're wondering, this is not the guy who wrote Shrek. That's William Stieg. But even still, I enjoyed Chess Story.

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

Another example: Let's suppose the memory is like a jade cabinet, but a cabinet belonging to an infinitely irresolute collector. Each time we look inside, the jade appears to be the same, yet the mind is forever replacing one chimera for another that resembles it. Let's suppose the memory is a cabinet of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon.

Excuse my digression, but as I write all this down, it occurs to me that there are as many ways to tell a story as there are ways to remember it.

Memory writes the story of her sister, Etheria, born beautiful, but mute. As children, Memory and Etheria are devotees of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, and they are two of those chosen children that Dodgson entertains with his fancies of imagination and clever games. Their parents, Angus and Margaret, are the kind of cheerful polymaths that only the Victorian era could produce. But the era, produces, too, a man like Radulph Tubbs, a fantastically wealthy industrialist who is charmed by Etheria's beauty. He charms her with a cabinet full of jade animals--which he himself finds rather appalling--and seduces her into marrying him, but the marriage is an unhappy and violent one. He rapes her with a jade phallus; he pries up the garden with its stone mosaics, the only place in the house where she feels at home. He replaces it with a smooth pyramid of glass, designed by an architect named Prosper Baconfield, who regards the pyramid as a geometrically perfect shape representative of an unforgiving divine principle.

It seems to me that Tubbs represents that part of the Victorian psyche that beckons toward the coming 20th century. He is suspicious of Dodgson/Carroll because he doesn't understand him; he loves no sight better than his own smokestacks, poisoning the air. No wonder he calls his estate "New Age." Memory tells us her theory is that he hates anything that exists according to the feminine principle, anything "folded, concealed, creased." He is unchecked industrialism and the death of sentiment. But strangely, it's his book: once Etheria disappears, she is gone, except for a single tantalizing vision toward the novel's end. It's Tubbs who's left trying to reckon with his own diseased behavior, a reckoning that takes him most of his life. The second half of the book is largely taken up with a trip to Egypt, where Tubbs and Baconfield are invested in a scheme to buy ibis mummies in bulk to grind them into gelatin power. (Unchecked industrialism eats up everything, even the dead.)

He's accompanied by a Hungerkunstler, a "Hunger Artist" who had recently captivated Etheria and Memory's father Angus, who believed that she, in disconnection from the material world, has accessed the fundamental universal language that haunts his dreams. But the Hungerkunstler is the most hungry of them all, a kind of id that presents to Tubbs the consequences of his own rapaciousness. She's also one of the novel's masterstrokes, a character who manages to be both silly and sinister. It's the introduction of the Hungerkunstler who strikes me as the novel really kicking into high gear, and establishing a sense that it could go anything or anywhere. Anyway, in Egypt Baconfield goes mad inside a pyramid, meeting the design of the divine face to face. Tubbs, too, faces down his dream in Egypt, coming to understand that only if he can find Etheria again will he ever find happiness of peace.

The Jade Cabinet is presented as a novel about language. Angus Sphery dreams of finding the immanent ur-language. It's present, perhaps, in Etheria, whose silence resembles in the language of the jade crystals she adores. Both Memory and (perhaps) Etheria grow up to become magicians, those people who claim to be able to turn "magic words" into real rabbits. Memory uses the same metaphor to describe, well, memory: "from out fragments of fur, I give you a living rabbit." Memory is the novel's other great theme; we are told from the beginning that much of the story is reconstructed from the memoirs of a contrite and much diminished Tubbs. But, in my mind, both of those rather well-trod themes sell short how inventive the novel is, how relentless and freewheeling; the pieces feel familiar but the construction is wholly original. Like I said, I actually read The Jade Cabinet as being deeply interested in intellectual history, pinpointing the Victorian era as the moment that the quest for deep knowledge was at last overwhelmed by the inexorable logic of production and consumption.

It's also really funny. I don't know if this lands the same without being in the context of the novel, but I can't remember reading anything recently that made me laugh as hard as this line, spoken by a doctor with whom Tubbs strikes up a friendship on his way back from English:

One morning, Spritzner, misconstruing Tubbs's ill humour, explained with a wag ill-fitted to Tubbs's impatience that his consuming interest in the vagaries and variabilities of the female anatomy had little to do with lechery and owed much to the physician's interest in physiognomy. Their friendship ended dramatically when just as a radiant redhead entered the dining room, Spritzner, his mouth full of toast, sputtered in Tubbs's ear:

'See dat vun? She haf a porple pussy!'

She haf a porple pussy.