Catherine the Great and Small by Olja Knezevic

The year was 1988. July in Belgrade was intolerably hot; the city smelled of dead dogs and cats, strays killed by the heat, and of dried-up insects, black and brown cockroaches. But the pressure was on for my finals. I had to be like a young stoic and, with books as my only defence, resist desire--summer's naked, sweaty, sexual desire--and grapple with my demons.

The "Catherine" of Catherine the Great and Small is actually Katarina, a.k.a. Kaca, Kacic, Kaya, Kati, Kate, or Katydid. Katarina is growing up in Montenegro at a time of great upheaval for the tiny country: first the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which results in the creation of Yugoslavia, and then the outbreak of nationalist hatreds under Slobodan Milosevic, who was supported by many Montenegrins. But Katarina is just a normal kid, into pop and punk music, and the upheavals of world politics are in the background the more immediate facts of her life: her friend Milica, a brash and budding young actress who seems destined either for fame or a spectacular crash, and her love Sinisa, who disappears for years and then shows up again, looking as handsome as ever. Katarina, Milica, and Sinisa all end up in Belgrade, where young Montenegrins seem to end up for school or drugs. But it's in Belgrade where Milica discovers the secretive Sinisa has been sleeping with older women for a place to live--including her own friend and landlady, Alma.

Catherine the Great and Small is split into two sections, titled--wait for it--"Catherine the Small" and "Catherine the Great." Of the two, I much preferred "Catherine the Small," which depicts the small dramas of life for the young in the post-Soviet Balkans with skill and humor. Milica gets too into drugs and loses her teeth; she still has beautiful feet, and so Katarina enlists her as a shoe model in a brief business empire. In fact, I liked this section best because Milica is the novel's most gripping character, a woman almost too full of life, so much so that it seems, with good reason, that she may be burning up that life's short fuse. "Catherine the Great" jumps ahead to Katarina's adult life, living in London with an abusive Montenegrin husband named Vuksan. When her grandmother dies, Katarina returns to her hometown, which has changed its named from Titograd to Pogdorica, and reconnects with, of course, Sinisa. There's much to love about this section, too, but I became impatient with the way that it "reveals" the truth of Sinisa's infidelity; stories where the drama is limited to a reappraisal of events in the past always make me impatient.

Still, I thought Catherine the Great and Small was engaging and well-written, a fascinating glimpse into the frankly familiar life of someone growing up in one of Europe's more wartorn--and still, somehow, little-known--corners. With the addition of Montenegro, my "Countries Read" list is up to 121!

A World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled--perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn't I, for my reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn't that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

Toby Hood is an Englishman who travels to South Africa to take up an open position managing a small publishing company in Johannesburg. He doesn't have much going on in England, and his curiosity makes him open to this unfamiliar country, which is so like England in some ways and completely strange in others. In South Africa, he makes immediate friends on both side of the color barrier. On one side, there's Cecil Rowe, a beautiful divorcee with whom Toby falls in love. Cecil is used to fine English tastes and moves in upper-class Anglo circles, but lacks the wealth to keep herself and her son Keith (lol) out of precarity. On the other side, there's Steven Sitole, a charismatic African who invites Toby into a world of townships, jazz, and associations with Indian gangsters. Steven fascinates Toby, who envies the kind of freewheeling life that Steven seems to lead.

It's not unheard of, but it was interesting to read Gordimer writing from a first person perspective here. It made the novel much warmer than many of hers, and it's easy to see (this is her second novel) how she moved away from the kind of intimate realism of A World of Strangers toward something that was simultaneously colder and more cynical. The novel presents a very simple double life: Toby wants to be at home both among his fellow Anglos and Black South Africans, as well as those like Anna Louw, an Afrikaaner activist who has given up connections and privileges to fight for people like Steven. And why shouldn't he? Of course, it isn't possible, as Toby is often reminded--by Cecil, describing her disgust with her own servants, or by his landlady, who tearfully and frightfully expels him when she finds out he has invited over "kaffirs." The whole thing is, as surely Gordimer means it to be, faintly ridiculous; do these people really think they can live separately as an empowered minority in a black country forever? We can see, as she cannot, how Cecil's isolation and lack of stability is downstream, at least in part, from living in a country where she fears and despises most of the people on the street.

A World of Strangers is good in a realistic kind of way, but it doesn't measure up to Gordimer's later masterpieces. I detect a kind of hopefulness and optimism in it that I think she loses later on, perhaps as she became more cynical about the possibility of political rapprochement between white and black South Africans. You can see, for instance, how much more open to Toby the people in Steven's world are than the Anglos would be to someone like Steven. There are some intimations of tension between Toby and Steven's people, and certainly the suggestion that the life Toby is leading is impossible in the long run. But there's little of the sense you get in later Gordimer that one's race will win out, that the ties of racial identity are in some sense insuperable, at least by individual effort. But I suspect some that find Gordimer chilly might actually find A World of Strangers more palatable.

Language City by Ross Perlin

This book is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present, and future. Now home to over seven hundred languages, early twenty-first century New York City is especially a last improbably refuge for embattled and endangered languages. Never before have cities like New York have been so linguistically various, and they may never be again, but this new hyperdiversity has hardly been mapped, let alone understood or supported. In particular, in just the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people speaking hundreds of languages have arrived in New York form heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedent rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they remain invisible and their words inaudible.

Ross Perlin is a linguist behind New York's Endangered Languages Alliance, a kind of ad hoc meet-up space where speakers of minority languages teach them or record them, working to preserve them in the face of erasure. Similar efforts are certainly being made around the world, but only in New York is it possible to capture as many languages as the ELA serves. I have to admit to a little tingle of pride when Perlin describes New York City as the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world. In fact, it's one of my favorite things about the city: walking around and hearing, in the course of an hour, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic, and many other languages besides that I'm unable to identify. Perlin's book is about some of those languages: languages that are spoken by minorities even in their homelands, and which resurface here in New York where they have a new opportunity to thrive.

This is actually a central point in the first section of the book, something that I'd never considered: immigrants to New York, and perhaps most major metropolises, are typically minorities in their homelands. Of course, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Dominant groups don't need to immigrate because they are dominant where they are. As a result, Perlin explains, what we think of as singular national languages are actually often patchworks of minority languages stitched together under a single umbrella, as with speakers of Sicilian and Ligurian and whatever else that get knitted together as "Italian." It was interesting to learn, for example, that most Iraqi immigrants to New York are Jewish. It's a dynamic that brings with it a complicated push-and-pull: the immigrant city offers a space for minority languages to thrive, but it also threatens to subsume them under national identities that supplant the language, too. This section of the book--the linguistic history of New York, beginning with Lenape speakers and Dutch immigrants and including the major immigrant waves of the 19th and 20th centuries--was my favorite.

About half the book is taken up with a series of biographies of speakers of minority languages who work with ELA. Much of the attention on the book has focused on Rasmina, a speaker of a Himalayan language called Seke, whose speakers all occupy a single "vertical village" building in Brooklyn. Of 700 extant speakers of Seke, one hundred live in this building! But there are others, too: a writer and academic who speaks Bessarabian Yiddish, a restaurateur who speaks the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, and Ibrahima, who helps spread the N'ko alphabet of West Africa. Anyone who knows my particular interests won't be surprised to hear that I most enjoyed the story of Karen, a Lenape speaker who worked improbably to revitalize the language here in the heart of Lenape homelands. Karen's story makes it clear that much of the Lenape language has been lost and has to be created anew; while there's a sadness to this, it also seems like a powerful communitarian act. Languages, Language City reminds us, are communities. And at a time when the powers that be are trying as hard as they can to eliminate the exact kinds of immigrants this book describes, it was powerful to be reminded of just what these language communities add to the greatest city in the world.

The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin

"Alone at last," said the Mouse. "Let's see, where were we? Right, we were discussing what's to be come of you. Or I was. You all seem a little shy on the subject. Oh, I know why, of course. This particular mouse wasn't born yesterday. He's been around the block a time or two. I'll tell you the truth, though. I was never really into tragedy. Control was always my thing, my gift. My special talent, you might say. Well, I never had any enemies to speak of. Popeye has enemies; Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Tweetie-Pie. Heckel and Jeckel have enemies. The Pink Panther. But not only Mickey the Mouse. I never had enemies. And neither do the people I hang with. My duckies and doggies. Life's too short. Hey, no offense." He looked around at the unsmiling children. "All right, all right," he said, "enough about me. What would you have wanted to be if you'd lived?" Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, and Sneezy stared at him, their ancient humors clogged, choked, stymied as ice, their deflected phlegms and cholers, their thickened bloods and biles subsumed in stupefied wonder. "Tch tch tch," said the Mouse, "you kids, you poor kids. I don't think I ever saw such losers. Where'd you grow up--on Fuck Street?"

Eddie Bale's son, Liam, dies a celebrity: everyone in England knows his name, and perhaps has contributed a few dollars to a fund for his care. But after the death, Eddie regrets spending all that sympathetic cash on doomed treatment that only lengthened Liam's life, if it did, by torturing him; he ought to have spent it making Liam happy. So his next scheme is to raise money to send a group of terminally ill children on a "dream holiday" to Walt Disney World in Orlando. (The novel opens with the Queen handing him a check for fifty pounds which he's instructed not to cash, but rather to show around, and induce others to give--that's the kind of novel it is, bravely unfazed by the threat of legal persecution from either Elizabeth or Mickey.) When they arrive, Orlando is experiencing a freak snowstorm--a sign, perhaps, that the dream holiday will not be all that it's cracked up to be.

Eddie's crew of kids is a motley one: there's Lydia Conscience (not the last such name), whose stomach tumor makes her look like a pregnant eleven-year old; Noah Cloth (see what I mean), who keeps having to give up bits of himself to amputation; Janet Order, whose hypoxia makes her blue; Charles Mudd-Gaddis, whose progeria makes him basically an eighty year old man. There are others, besides, chief among them Benny Maxine, the oldest and most normal-looking, whose leadership among the children threatens to devolve into schemes and dangerous jokes. The adult chaperones are no less ragtag: the gay male nurse trying to nick a set of animatronic manuals for his waxworker boyfriend; the chronic masturbator; the nurse who won't shut up about how she used to care for Prince Andrew; the doctor who is primarily excited to go to Orlando because he wants to do up-close medical examinations of Jews. And then there's Eddie, of course, who has pinned his moral life on what is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

The Magic Kingdom is, as the summary suggests, a strange novel. It struck me as kind of fearless in how faithful it is to the real Disney World; I had to imagine the avuncular-looking Elkin riding It's a Small World and Spaceship Earth again and again to get the details right. This Disney World is instantly recognizable; a cavalcade of garish and shallow images and sounds that promises a kind of satiety it can't fulfill; we understand when the kids get quickly bored and led into mild disobedience by Benny. But I was also struck by how little the book was interested in Disney World. There are a few really good moments and details--one that sticks out to me for I-don't-know-what-reason is Noah, who is depicted as kind of an idiot, going on a gift-shop spree as a way of grasping at the normal life he'll never have--but Elkin's style is wordy, jokey, longwinded, more interested in depicting the inner lives of each of a large cast of characters than getting them out into the world to interact. The scene quoted above, in which the male nurse's new lover dons the Mickey costume and perpetrates some slight psychological torture, is strangely wandering and limp. Now and then Elkin makes some truly bonkers choices, which mostly, somehow, work, as when the children exhibit the ability to meet up in each other's dreams.

I enjoyed The Magic Kingdom, though its touchpoints are several authors I consider not-quite-my-style: Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. (And it must be said I don't think it's a coincidence that Elkin gives one of his characters the last name Gaddis.) It's goofy (pun intended) and overwritten, at times exhausting, but it's this maximal goofiness that allows Elkin to address the darkness at the center of the novel--the imminence of these children's deaths--with tragic effect. When the inevitable happens, as it must, it cuts through the goofs with laserlike prediction. It's a silly, strange, and somehow sweet novel.

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

Summer whites, green gardens, Mississippi, white summer suits and seersucker suits, those were the sights. In the Garden District, Claude stopped and pointed out the jasmine and the cicadas in the night. That was his innocence to me. He had the sweetness of the town itself and broken my heart completely into a million pieces on the floor, as he himself would say, for he touched my heart, to such degree, that I had to steel myself, or my heart would break, like his, into a million pieces on the floor. For in Claude Collier I saw my very youth, a fateful green garden, parades on the Avenue, an orchestra on a bandstand, my youth in New Orleans.

Louise Brown is in love with Claude Collier, a young man from her faintly genteel social set in New Orleans. Claude's main character traits are his extreme kindness and compassion and a general tendency toward haplessness, toward nervous breakdowns. In fact, everyone in Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or maybe they just claim to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown because it is, as it still is, a fashionable thing to say, but for Claude Collier it is God's honest truth. It is, perhaps, like the southern Gothics of Truman Capote, a trait of New Orleans itself, and as Louise describes above, Claude is for her the embodiment of the city and her experience in it, which is what makes it such a tragedy when he runs off to the Northeast.

Structurally, Lives of the Saints is an odd, tricky book. The sections are typically quite brief, marked by bon mots and sudden revelations of character among Louise's New Orleans set. (It reminded me, actually, of Renata Adler's Speedboat, transposed to a very different setting and voice.) A reader gets the quick impression that plot is secondary to the adumbration of a particular place and time, and is happy enough to go along, because Lemann's evocation of New Orleans is so simply and beautifully drawn ("summer whites, green gardens"--sometimes it's as simple as that). But tragedy sneaks into the corners and sets the novel moving: Claude's brother Saint falls out of a tree and is killed. Lemann's prose is so simple (sorry, that word again) that I had to go back and reread the paragraph to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. But it's this death that sends Claude and his tweedy father, Mr. Collier, both reading, and sends Claude off to New York and Boston, leaving Louise to pine for him.

There's really not much more to the book than that. There were times when I felt frustrated by the staccato style of the novel, by the way it seems to turn in place, but after the death of Saint, I was impressed by its humor and lightness of touch, and the way it balances the melancholy. And I was frequently struck by the loveliness of Lemann's writing:

And yet one felt such a melancholy or downright sorrow, as when there is something amiss, as when you wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning suddenly, before it is time to wake up, with the distinct feeling that something is wrong--something with this life you are reading is very wrong--except you do not know what it is. It is a nameless wrong. The nameless wrong follows you wherever you go but you can't put your finger on it.

Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann

...Now he became in truth a crazed and greedy butterfly, no longer pretending to know who he was or what he was looking for, dreading the weary moment when he must stick it in, dreading the moment when the lady must leave, but avid to have and have had, his tips becoming smaller as the money went, the girls giving him colds, coughs, sore throats, weird new aches in his balls... What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn't remember te name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn't remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left hi ma liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by. When he wanted to eat out a whore, he'd say:   I want to kin kao you,   which means,   I want to eat rice you,   and then he'd point to her pussy --

"The journalist" of Vollmann's Butterfly Stories is on assignment in Thailand, which mostly means spending every cent he has on prostitutes. Unlike his rakish companion "the photographer," the journalist is a real romantic, finding something in these women that feeds some need that lies deeper than sex, although they fulfill that need for him, too. He falls half in love with nearly all of them, until he falls fully in love on a trip deep into the jungles of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge have been lately on a killing spree. It's hard to say what makes this prostitute, Vanna, different from the others, except that she becomes a repository for these deep needs; her feelings toward him--as opposed to feelings toward the necklace he buys her or the money he gives--are inscrutable and ambivalent. But his feelings are strong enough that he marries her--despite having a wife back in the U.S.--or perhaps the marriage is in name only, a name given to the strength of those feelings. Naturally, when he's whisked out of Cambodia, he yearns for her, first in Thailand, then back in the United States, where he purposely wrecks his marriage out of jealousy and fear.

It's tempting to read Butterfly Stories as a companion book to Whores for Gloria, another book about a man deeply enmeshed with the local prostitutes. The protagonist of Whores for Gloria trawls San Francisco's Tenderloin District, not Southeast Asia, and though they can be irascible or even hostile, the prostitutes there have a kind of transparency that the journalist searches for in vain. In Gloria, the protagonist rarely even has sex, preferring to listen to the whores' stories, but the language and cultural barrier make it impossible to know if any of the Thai and Cambodian girls are telling the truth, or if they are, whether it gets lost somewhere in translation. Their opacity is at the heart of the book's tragedy; we know that the journalist will never find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for both depends and is stymied by the exotic nature of Vanna and the others. Even in the flesh, she's a dream and a fantasy, and it's for the fantasy that he wrecks his life, upending his marriage and ultimately even contracting AIDS.

It's hard to say where Butterfly Stories might fall in a ranking of Vollmann's works for me. It's more standoffish and at-arm's-length than Whores for Gloria, and perhaps less satisfying by design. It's frustrating read--the guy is such a loser, and I can imagine that someone who picks this one up as their first Vollmann might be put off by the exoticizing and fetishism on display, though I think one more attuned to his work will notice the instability of that quality, if not the critique of it. Most disturbing to me was recognizing a small detail--the journalist, unable to re-reach Vanna, travels to the Arctic and falls for an Inuit girl--that seemed so like The Rifles that I couldn't help but wonder how much of Vollmann really is in here. (That's something he does quite a bit, I think--puts himself in the story in ways that are ambiguous, mixing himself in indeterminate percentages.) There's a nobility to the guy in Whores for Gloria, but what the journalist evokes is more along the lines of pity--a much more discomforting emotion. But it must be said that Vollmann makes it look easy, and if Butterfly Stories does not stand out among his works, taken in isolation it must be astonishing.