The Dazzling Paget Sisters by Ariane Bankes

What elusive quality is it that propels people into the centre of things? My mother, Celia Paget, and her identical twin sister Mamaine seemed to possess that quality, to gravitate towards the very heart of the era in which they lived. Born in 1916 and brought up in relative simplicity in rural Suffolk, their lives became entangled with some of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whether as friends or lovers, muses or wives.

The Paget sisters were identical twins who went from reluctant debutantes to society darlings, eventually becoming enmeshed in the social circles of England's greatest mid-century authors. Celia was a longtime lover of George Orwell, while her twin sister Mamaine was the lover and eventually wife of Orwell's friend and intellectual rival Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian emigre known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Mamaine carried on a brief, torrid affair with Albert Camus, and around the margins of their lives other literary greats hung: Beauvoir and Sartre, of course, as well as Andre Malraux and others. The Dazzling Paget Sisters, written by Celia's daughter Ariane Bankes, seeks to discover what it is that drew her mother and aunt "into the centre of things."

What that "elusive quality" was, I'm not quite sure. Apparently (as one can tell easily from the cover) both twins were quite beautiful, and they had a kind of twinly, otherworldly connection with each other. The question seems like a powerful one--why would these two ordinary girls from Suffolk end up so wrapped up with the century's literary greats?--but Bankes' biography mostly has the effect of demythologizing the very question she poses. The answer seems to be part privilege and part happenstance: the girls were "picked up" by a society maven named Dick Wyndham, who introduced them to these writers. As the story of their lives unfolded, I began to understand their lives not as a series of unlikely brushes with greatness, but something more ordinary: these writers, of course, all knew each other, and it stands to reason that their social circle included people who weren't writers.

What I enjoyed most about The Dazzling Paget Sisters was learning more about the emerging tensions between this circle as the Cold War began. Koestler in particular, who modeled Darkness at Noon on the Soviet gulag, spared no mercy for his fellow writers who let their Socialist sympathies lead them toward the USSR. This led to both Koestler and Mamaine becoming, half-willingly, useful operatives for the CIA, something I wish the book had explored in more detail. And I was interested, of course--who wouldn't be--in the doomed romantic dalliance between Mamaine and Camus, under Koestler's nose. But mostly, I felt that The Dazzling Paget Sisters might have been better served by an author other than Celia's daughter, who approaches the material in a hyper-faithful chronological way that never quite penetrates the surface. It made me wonder if someone with more of an outside perspective, with less loyalty to the letter of the story, might have found a way in to the real "centre of things."

The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

She let her thoughts run free. She knew perfectly well that Savage, after years of enforced solitude, during which he had been afforded no prospect of a woman's love, was unlikely to be coming to her room just for a bundle of clothes. If he wanted to get into bed with her, what then, ought she to raise the house? She imagined calling out (though not until he was gone), and her door opening, and the bare shanks of the rescuers jostling in their nightshirts--the visiting preacher, Mr Luke, her father, the upstairs lodgers--and she prayed for grace. She thought of the forgiven--Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, the wife of Hosea who had been a prostitute, Mary Magdalene, Mrs Watson who had cohabited with a drunken man.

The title story of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Ways of Escape concerns a young Australian girl who discovers an escaped convict hiding in a rural church. Dressed in a hood, she can't see his face, and so she is able to project her young desires and fears onto him--not that he's young or handsome, exactly; she never rises quite to that level of imagination, but that he's arrived to carry her away on a tide of romance, in its older meaning. She waits for him to climb into her bedroom for a set of clothes as promised, but he never shows, and she discovers in the morning that he's run off with a much older servant woman.

This ending is a little too much of a punchline; it doesn't do justice to Fitzgerald's powers of plotting. But the story works because Fitzgerald captures young Alice's perspective so well: never over-wild, but callow and apprehensive, perhaps even purposely refusing to follow the line of her thoughts in order to let the mysterious event of her life happen. The convict has an analogue in the title character of "The Red-Haired Girl," a servant and painter's muse who ends up sacked for petty theft--how paltry the objects of our fascination turn out to be! But there's real magic, too, to be had, as with the title character of "Beehernz," a reclusive conductor living on a remote Scottish isle who is convinced to return and conduct a major orchestra because of the simple folk song idly sung by a woman who seems to the story in other ways entire irrelevant.

I really loved "Desideratus," a story about a poor boy who loses a precious medal--there's the great Penelopean image of the boy discovering the medal at the bottom of a puddle and ice and having to return after the thaw, only to find it gone--and then traces it to a wealthy estate, where a rich man pries the medal from the hands of his ill son. We never find out why the son was sick (did it have something to do with the ice and the thaw?) or whether the rich man is serious when he asks if the poor boy would trade the medal for a sum of money. We never find out anything else at all, because the lives of the rich and poor have only intersected here, once, obliquely, and then sundered to remain at arm's length.

But I must admit my favorite was "The Axe," a gruesome little ghost story framed as a memo from a middle manager to his boss, who has forced him to fire a long-time employee. That employee reemerges at the office with his neck severed, as if with the proverbial axe, and the middle manager rushes to his office, where, we learn, he's been writing the memo the whole time, not knowing whether the bloody apparition is still on the other side of the door. Fitzgerald was always so clever--and yet her work hardly ever seems too-clever or too neat; cleverness is always in service to a real human feeling. I'd long ago finished her novels, so it was a real treasure to discover this collection of stories, which I didn't even realize existed--none, perhaps, has quite the impact of her longer work, but it was great to luxuriate again in the work of such a peerless writer.

The Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perisic

Cats confused people. Not just those on the island who had never seen the animals, but also the Greeks who had taken them from the Egyptians--because that was not long ago, they were not used to them yet. They were the first ungovernable animals that made friends with the humans. When humans stood before cats, they did not see their own purpose.

In ancient Syracuse, a slave boy named Kalia becomes attached to a cat named Miu. Miu is a novelty among the Greeks, a strange creature brought from Egypt, where it's rumored they worship this strange, aloof creature. Miu is badly mistreated by the son of Kalia's owner, and the stark contrast between the freedom in the cat's bearing and Pigras' controlling nature awakens Kalia to the injustice of his own state as a slave. Hiding out in a barn, he ends up absconding on a ship with Miu--and a donkey named Mikro--on its way to the Adriatic coast, where Sicilian Greek settlers intend to set up a new polis. Kalia, Miu, and Mikro all become founding members of this new city, and it is through this new enterprise that Kalia comes to understand the nature of political and social life.

The third-person Kalia sections are interspersed with first-person observations by "Scatterwind," a creature who is made of the wind, if such a thing can be possible--even Scatterwind admits that to use the term "I" seems a bit out of place. Scatterwind, a relative perhaps of the bag of winds that sent Odysseus' men scrambling across the Mediterranean, is a keen observer of human (and animal) life. Because he is immortal, or at least long lived, he looks down at Kalia and the building of the polis with a kind of bird's-eye view that allows him to understand better how it expresses the nature of humans to collaborate and contest. Much of human behavior is inexplicable to Scatterwind, and his theories don't always pass muster: his accounting for love, for instance, emerges from the need for energy in the form of heat. And yet, his perspective puts the travails of one slave, one cat, and one donkey into a larger context of human flourishing and behavior.

The Scatterwind sections are, I think, the most novel and effective part of A Cat at the End of the World. I enjoyed the story of Kalia escaping with Miu, and the way that the plight of the domestic animals helps him understand his own place in the world and expand his sense of humanity and justice. The novel loses its energy a little, I think, as soon as the boat arrives on the Illyrian coast. There are excellent elements, great characters--the obsessive city planner whose exile from his polis is tantamount to a death sentence, the gruff-with-a-heart-of-gold former soldier missing an arm--but not having the wider perspective of a Scatterwind, I had trouble understanding the dynamic of the city's growth and the conflicts inherent to it. Kalia grows, becomes an adult, obtains a wife and has children, but these things are, even in a 400 page book, zoomed through so hastily I had a hard time integrating them to the story as a reader. But through it all there is Miu, the refugee, whose proud independence and nobility serve as a counterweight to shifting allegiances and philosophies.

With the addition of Croatia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 111!

Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene

The novel On the Way Back nagged at me night and day on my return to France. Those characters which I had so mistakenly drawn from life wouldn't let me rest. I would constantly remember Chuchu's boast, "I'm never going to die"; is complex theology--"I believe in the Devil. I don't believe in God," and the way that he would prove the existence of the Devil by pushing at a swing door in the wrong direction. The General and Chuchu went on living, far away in Panama, and they refused to become characters in my novel. And Panama--so much of the little country had still been left unseen and it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever be able to return for a second visit.

In the 1970's, Graham Greene received a call inviting him to the small Central American nation of Panama. The request came from no other than General Omar Torrijos, Panama's recently installed leader. Torrijos, it seems, was sort of an odd duck: not explicitly Marxist but having come to power in a coup against Panama's right-wing regime, a passionate believer in social democracy but not in partisan or sectarian politics. His core issue is the return of the Panama Canal to Panamanian control. Arriving in Panama City, Greene finds himself immersed in a world of intriguing figures: Sandinistas and Somozans working against each other in nearby Nicaragua, right-wing journalists, scheming viziers. But at the heart of it all is Torrijos, who turns out, in Greene's telling, to be a simple and humble person who only wants to spend a little time with what he sees, through Greene's novels, as a kindred spirit.

I'm reaching a bittersweet age where I'm exhausting all my favorite novelists, so it was heartening to calculate recently that, at the rate of one book a year, I can be reading Graham Greene into my fifties, even if I have likely read all of his best works. I was drawn to Getting to Know the General because I'd never read one of Greene's non-fiction books, and I was interested to see what it was like for Greene becoming, in a way, a character from his own books. In fact, for the length of his time in Panama, which includes sporadic journeys over a period of five or six years, Greene is writing a book in his head based on the General and his right-hand man Chuchu. (Despite his expressions of admiration for Torrijos, it seems like most of Greene's time in Panama is spent with Chuchu.) The book, called On the Way Back, is doomed to never be written. Perhaps the real people crowded out the fiction, or perhaps Greene simply got too deeply integrated with his Panamanian friends to cultivate the necessary distance to write his novel.

The subtitle of the book, after all, is "The Story of an Involvement," and Greene did get involved: several times he describes, with offhand diffidence, lending his efforts to negotiating for the liberation of hostages taken by Central American guerilla groups. Greene is there in the room when the treaty between Torrijos and the Carter administration that provides for the return of Panamanian sovereignty to the Canal Zone; it's fascinating to see him look witheringly at some of the assembled slaughterers, like Pinochet and Henry Kissinger. Novel, too, to read about his friendship with "Gabo," Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who ends up as a kind of Latin-American counterpart in the light intrigues that Torrijos extracts from Greene.

So, as much as anything, Getting to Know the General is a fascinating document that captures a little-remembered slice of 20th century history. But it's a pleasure, too, in the way that Greene lends his cosmopolitan eye and ear to the natural and cultural landscapes of Panama: its islands, its mountains--like the one that will ultimately take the General's life in a suspicious plane crash--its towns, its rundown hotels and haunted houses, its terrible food and vile rum punches.  

The Evening Wolves by Joan Chase

From the beginning Dad said Gloria would bring a ray of sunlight into our darkness. He warned us to find the same star--win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West. Sometimes it's dazzling, Gloria up in the morning, dressed to the nines for ham and eggs. Ready for a date if one should come knocking, lipstick prints on the coffee cups. Gloria has done us the great favor of leaving her wonderful home and responsible job for a thankless task. She did it of her own free will, including giving up smoking, although I think nothing is quite what she expected. Still, she can say, "I always wanted a family of my own," real tears and her smile breaking together. I can't think what it will come to and I wring my hands, avoiding her eyes. Sometimes she says I'm laughing at her, but I don't think so, although I don't always know what comes over my face when I'm not looking.

Francis Clemmons is red-haired, with the fiery personality to match, and so is Gloria--a perfect match. But Gloria doesn't quite know what she's getting into with Francis' children. The young boy--to young to remember his late mother--is no problem, really, but the two girls, Margy and Ruthann, are headstrong.  Francis handles them with the power of a mad king, making elaborate jokes, pouring cereal over their heads when they complain about being hungry, leaving them on the side of the road when they provoke his ire. (It's hard not to see, though I am constantly reminded of it, the tyrannical father of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, though deep down we sense that Francis is a good and caring father, unlike Stead's.) The girls, for their part, give as good as they get. They grow up in this unusual household, become young adults with sexual yearnings, and Gloria is only partly capable of giving the guidance that they miss from their mother. A family that can be made can be unmade, too, and soon the two girls are off on their own, sundering the fragile ecosystem that the five had built.

I really loved Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. It is, I believe, the only other novel that Chase wrote in her lifetime. It also tells the story of a big family, but it's fun trick is that it is narrated by all the family's young girls at once, in a "we" that can be split or combined as needed. Here, the narrative skips much more ordinarily through a series of first person narratives: Margy, Ruthann, Gloria, Tommy--though never Francis. This choice, in fact, is one of the reasons that the novel doesn't really seem to work. The novel is so fragmented, so hectic, that I felt as if I hardly knew what was going on, and I didn't get much out of the choice to depict the same moments from the perspectives of different characters. The two girls, I found, were not different enough, and they all share their father's elliptical, allusive speech, that made it hard to distinguish one from the other. Eventually I understood that Ruthann is more studious and more beautiful, more precociously sexual but also tormented by it--she marries a preacher to expiate her guilt over losing her virginity--while Margy is more lumpen, more aloof. But they both sounded a little too much like Francis, who perhaps sounds too much like Joan Chase.

Chase was an excellent prose writer, and I enjoyed the headlong flow of the sentences, which can be quite beautiful even as they borrow liberally from stock phrase and cliche ("win her heart or hitch up to the next wagon West") but the "big picture" was entirely lost on me. Big jumps in time, the introduction of new characters--it all gets lost in the thicket of language. It's hard to say exactly why this novel fails when The Queen of Persia works so well. Partly it's the point-of-view choice, but that's not it entirely. Perhaps it all comes down to the suspension of disbelief and the persuasion of character; I never really felt these characters were anything but curtain-thin. In The Queen of Persia everything comes together to give the illusion of a wholeness, a whole family--but the fractured, broken family of The Evening Wolves never has that kind of wholeness.

The Name of the World by Denis Johnson

What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don't know, but I have to say that the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of perspective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her--not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn't take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter--yes, and for a while  she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

Michael Reed is an academic at one of those huge frosty schools in the American Midwest. His life is, as for all academics, fairly banal, except that he's haunted by the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash several years back. Wherever he goes, he seems to confront symbols of his own life in the wake of their death: the painting in the art gallery that makes concentric shapes, each one becoming more perverse; the students ice-skating around the unreachable monolith on the campus rink. Reed's life is like that, moving around the fundamental absence of his family, never able to break free and form a new trajectory. In his final year at the college, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful red-headed cellist who may offer him the key to a way of living again.

Written plainly, it sounds like an eye-roller: middle-aged academic finds new life in an affair with a beautiful young student. It's what BlueSky Y.A. mavens think all "classic" fiction is like. And there are some elements of that, in fact. Yet, Michael and the absurdly named Flower Cannon never sleep together, though he does see her naked twice: once, in an artsy "performance piece" where she shaves her mons pubis, and again in a racy strip contest at a local casino. (The satire on the academy and modern art that juxtaposition makes isn't exactly subtle.) But more interesting still is the slippage of Michael's attitude toward Flower, who reminds him at times of his wife, at other times his daughter, or someone he would have liked his daughter to grow up into. The Y.A. mavens might object at how available Flower is to the older, homely (self-described) Michael, and how easily Johnson associates her sexiness with mystery and healing. But I was really struck by the strange story that Flower tells about why she's so open to Michael hanging around, in which she tells him that he reminds her of a strange man who kidnapped her when she was young. It's so weird and difficult to integrate into the novel that it seemed like an acknowledgement that Flower Cannon is no archetype but a person with a strange and luminous life of her own.

This felt like a strange sort of novel for Johnson. His work, it seems to me, often focuses on precarity: the precarious lives of the poor and addicted, or the precarity of spies whose are always gambling with their life or safety. His characters always seem to live well outside the margins of ordinary society--a description that might even take in the post-apocalyptic strivers of Fiskadoro or the rustic hermit of Train Dreams. Compared to the protagonists of those other novels, Michael Reed is frustratingly ordinary, and it's possible to read The Name of the World as a novel by a guy who got so comfortable in the world of academia that he found himself detached from the worlds he once thought important to put down on the page. (OK, I guess being an academic is also quite precarious these days, but that isn't quite what I mean, either.) But Johnson writes about grief in ways that feel devastating and true, and quite different than the ordinary bromides one gets, and so in that way The Name of the World is a reminder of the ways that deep interior experiences, too, can put us outside the common life. And of course, with Johnson there are always the sentences, the incredible sentences.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

He perched on the chaise, in the muted light of the small lamp next to it, his lovely, dark farmhouse floating near him, the night just beyond the room's closed shutters... Perhaps the nervous American schoolteacher was sitting on her balcony like a sentinel at the prow of a ship keeping them from harm... How many wonders there used to be for him! The miraculous human landscapes! Long, brilliant nights... Was he never to be one of those again? Whatever role he'd been assigned in the girl's drama--her drama of triumph, her drama of degradation--it was certain to be a despicable or ridiculous one. There was no chance--at least almost no chance--that she would receive from him what he so longed to provide: even a tiny portion of pleasure or solace. And when she remembered him, no doubt she would remember him with contempt.

The first and title story of Deborah Eisenberg's collection Twilight of the Superheroes is a snapshot of post-9/11 New York. Nathaniel and his group of friends have been renting an incredible top-floor apartment, procured through the help of his uncle Lucien, from an absent Japanese businessman, but the experience has been deeply tainted by the bird's-eye view the apartment has given them of the collapse of the towers. "Twilight of the Superheroes" is an attempt to capture a kind of ennui that comes in the wake of destruction, and the feeling of things deteriorating around you: the Japanese businessman is returning and Nathaniel and his friends must scrounge again, like everyone else, for their refuge; though the apartment is poisonous, it's worse somehow to let it go because one has to let the dream go as well. Even the hero of Nathaniel's indie comic strip, Passivityman, seems to have curdled; his passivity is turned against himself, toward submission to the forces of capitalist warp against which his passivity was once a rebellion.

I didn't quite get what Eisenberg was doing in this story. I had to read the others in the collection to see that these stories often lack a center--it's a story about Nathaniel, but also Lucien, but also a half-dozen people besides. They shift to new perspectives, without attempting artificially to bring those perspectives to an intersection or resolution. I thought this worked much better in "Like It Or Not," a story about a meek American schoolteacher who allows herself to be taken out for a single day by a rich art collector in the Italian countryside. It's a story about the teacher's, Kate's, feelings of inadequacy against the backdrop of the luxurious and ancient Mediterranean, but it pauses for a long beat to capture her host's, Harry's, liaison with a spoiled barely-legal teen in the next hotel room. I was struck by how sympathetic the portrait of Harry was (quoted above), how lacking in judgment, and thus more powerful than prudishness or condemnation might have been. The story returns to Kate's perspective and continues chugging along; what Harry has done is largely irrelevant to her, but the story has captured a multiplicity that makes it richer. For this reason, I suppose, the stories are longish, languid things: in a book of 230 pages, there are only six.

The final story, "The Flaw in the Design," was one of my favorites, and I thought it returned to some of the themes of "Twilight of the Superheroes" in a more successful way. Here, two parents struggle with the mania of their young adult son, whose verbal floridity and unpredictable attitudes are in part a reaction to the father's work with some nameless--but certainly evil--multinational concern. To me, this captured much better a post-9/11 feeling about the world being constricted by forces of power and greed, and the hopelessness one feels against them at a personal level. And the final scene--in which the mother seeks out an anonymous tryst on the D.C. metro--complicates and estranges it even further. I liked all the others to varying extents, including the boldness of "Window," about a woman who falls in love with a single father who also happens to be a violent gun-runner. Here, as in the other stories, the pleasure is in seeing the story unfold, not chronologically necessary but in layers, though here I thought Eisenberg was less successful in hiding that authorly hand.

Jackson's Dilemma by Iris Murdoch

Edward was (as Benet recalled and even retailed later) made of steel. He had ceased to tremble. He was no longer pale, but somewhat flushed. He sat silently, very still, frowning and looking down at the paper. Then he handed it back to Benet, and speaking in his ordinary voice, he said, 'So be it.' then he said, 'We must put off the wedding guests. Is it too late to ring them?'

Benet, now more collected, said, 'That is her writing, isn't it? It could be a hoax--'

'It is her writing -- rather hasty -- but yes, hers."

On the eve of Edward Lannion's marriage to Marian Berran, a message is discovered at Hatting Hall, Edward's estate. It's in Marian's handwriting, and it says she cannot marry him, and has gone away. This sends the hanger-son at Hatting Hall, and its neighbor, Penndean, into a flurry of handwringing and activity, chief among these Benet, the master of Penndean who orchestrated, more or less, the marriage between the two. It's Benet's servant, the mysterious Jackson, who ends up getting to the bottom of things. through cunning and sheer luck he's the one who tracks down Marian, who is in a state of hysteria after being coerced into writing the note by her Australian lover. Jackson, sensing perhaps that she is really more in love with the Australian than Edward, delivers her to him, leading to a chain of events that resorts the fragile ecosystem of the two houses.

It took me a while to figure out what exactly this novel was doing. Ultimately, though Marian's letter feels like the beginning of chaos--like the mysterious rock thrown through Edward's window at the beginning of the novel--it ends with all the characters understanding themselves better and pairing off in happy relationships. Edward ends up--spoiler alert--with the widowed Anna, whom he has always truly loved. Marian ends up with the Australian. Tuan, one of Benet's hangers-on, distinguished by being Jewish and neurotic, ends up with Marian's sister Rosalind, who had until now been nursing a wayward crush on Edward herself. And Benet ends up with Jackson, who he inherited from the dead patriarch "Uncle Tim," and whose mysterious nature he has always been unduly suspicious of--Jackson's deeds, in this case, wipe away the suspicion and bring the master and servant together in a new relationship as friends. Looking at it this way, the novel is something of a fairy tale or a Shakespearean comedy, and it suggests that the characters are induced to throw off the yoke of "Uncle Tim," whose dead hand guides the misbegotten relationship between Edward and Marian.

I didn't think much of this worked, really. I thought the novel made the fatal flaw of depicting Jackson as both mysterious--he shows up at Tim's/Benet's door with no history or family, and only the one name--while also giving us sections of his internal third person deliberation. It might have worked if Jackson really had been a figure of mystery, but the mysteriousness here feels like something more declared than explored. I was left wondering what it is about the guy that everyone feels is so extraordinary. I was put off, too, by Jackson's delivering of Marian to the Australian, who has basically gotten Marian drunk and forced her to write that letter. I was shocked by Jackson making such a mistake as to deliver Marian up to a sort of predator, and shocked moreover when I came to understand that Murdoch didn't think it was much of a mistake. I often find Murdoch's novels frustrating, teasing up big reveals or dramatic moments that don't quite come, piddling around with philosophical ideas that have little or nothing to do with the story, and this one might have been the most frustrating of all.

Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann

Whether it is a happy life or a sad one the Skinz live is of course unknowable to anyone watching them stride by, turning their bulging skulls greedily upon their bulging necks, trying to pitiless, exclusive; not listening much to one another; but we can consider the question. The lone ones lean up against the restaurant windows, hunching their heads in like turtles at the same time they swivel their gaze in what might be anxiety or might be automatic street wisdom. They spend too much time waiting, but on the whole they are arguably happy, having their fights to look forward to. What more, after all, could anyone yearn for in his guts than the chance to hurt somebody else, jawkicking a soul to screaming subhumanness in order to reiterate that I live?

William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories are organized in the order of the visible spectrum, from "White Knights" to "Violet Hair," passing through every color in between. The symbolism there is immediately apparent: I am going to tell you about the full spectrum of human experience, of all the different kinds of people in the world, and though they may seem to one another quiet alien, they are all parts of the same phenomenon. And then, right from the beginning, he challenges you with this easy observation by giving you a story about Nazi Skinheads living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. In fact, this story (chapter? essay? section?) is classic Vollmann, a dispatch from a margin of the world that most people would prefer to pretend doesn't exist, or if it does, to think of it somehow as below noticing or writing about. Vollmann's depiction of the Skinz is both sympathetic and unsparing; they are racist and violent but also, in some way, childlike. The next story, "Ladies and Red Lights," builds on the depiction of Tenderloin prostitutes that appears in Vollmann's Whores for Gloria, but it was "White Knights" that struck me most as that book's successor and heir.

The other section I really liked was "Yellow Rose," about the Vollmann character's brief and doomed relationship with a young Korean woman named Jenny. Jenny's family will never accept a white boyfriend, something the narrator knows but cannot accept, and his insistence on presenting Jenny with an engagement ring is one of the book's saddest and most powerful moments. But the whole thing is really driven by the power of Jenny's voice, twinged with not-quite-Englishisms and a bubbliness that conceals a deeper desperation. ("Mom would stab me with knives... Mom would fry me alive if she know. I'm become steel faced, as my mother said these days.") I was delighted when these two stories, "White Knights" and "Yellow Rose," came together in the story "Blue Wallet," wherein the Vollmann character invites both Jenny and her friends and his skinhead friends to the same party, with predictably tense results. (The title refers to a wallet that Jenny loses, assuming it was stolen by said skinheads.)

There are other stories here that explore the margins of Bay Area society, notably "The Blue Yonder," a fantastical imagining of the motivations that drive a real-life killer of the homeless who was never identified or caught, and "Indigo Engineers," about a group of scrap metal engineers who attract huge crowds for a kind of proto-Battle Bots exhibition of machines that stab and slice each other. But other stories seemed to me, if not failed experiments exactly, big swings that never quite come together. I didn't really connect with "The Green Dress," about a man who falls in love with his neighbor's green dress--not his neighbor--stealing it and treating it as a lover. And I thought that a pair of mytho-historical stories, one about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace called "Scintillant Orange" and one about the Thugs of ancient India called "The Yellow Sugar," never quite rose to the convincing level that Vollmann perfected in his novels about the colonization of North America. Like The Atlas, this is really an odds-and-sods collection with organizational pretenses. Well, they're all odd, and a couple are sods, but when he's at his best, there's really nothing like him, is there?

Chaka by Thomas Mofolo

Chaka, right from his childhood, did not have many wishes; his desire was for one thing only: kingship and fame. Now he is very famous and he is a great king. Is it possible that he will be satisfied? Never! Now his greed has been aroused, and he is in search of something which even he himself does not know. Now Chaka was able to decide on matters of war without anything standing in his way, he alone having the power to do as he wished. He looked upon all the nations to the north, up to the places which even he did not know, and he longed to see his kingdom stretch till it reached those very places which he did not know. He looked upon those nations settled among the sea and stretching to the south, and the saw the villages and hamlets; great kings and small, the country adorned with villages built on the foundation of peace, and he smiled to himself.

Masotho (I just learned this is the demonym for someone from Lesotho) author Thomas Mofolo's Chaka is an account of the life of the legendary 19th century Zulu king Chaka, perhaps better known in the Western world as Shaka Zulu. Chaka's life begins ignominiously, as the illegitimate son of a king; though at first it seems that, as the only male son, he will be the king's heir, a sudden spate of issue from the king's other wives sees both Chaka and his mother sent into exile. Chaka is bullied by the other children of the bush until he commits an unthinkable pair of deeds, killing a rampaging lion and hyena, two of the vicious creatures that stalk the villages without mercy. I was struck by the way that Mafolo describes the cowardice on behalf of the villagers, who refuse to run to the aid of anyone taken by these beasts. Chaka's acts are an expression not only of his bravery and cunning but a harbinger of things to come: Chaka will transform his kingdom from cowardice to a highly militarized society that uses violence to establish an empire in Southern Africa.

Chaka's adult life has the shape of ancient myth. Through his bravery and skill, and with the help of a shadowy "sorcerer" named Isanusi and a couple of other mystical personages, he defeats his siblings and becomes king, introducing to his kingdom the new name "MaZulu," or "People of the Sky." But even at the pinnacle of a power that no other king has known, he's greedy for more, and Isanusi advises him that if he wishes to reach the true extent of his greatness, he must sacrifice his beloved, a woman named Nowila, whom Chaka ultimately kills at his own hands. It's a familiar story: a man gains all the power in the world and loses his soul. Chaka exhibits what I understand (from Wikipedia, of course) to be an attitude of ambivalence toward the legendary king, who led the Zulu to become a great empire, but did so by ruling through violence and fear. Chaka's killing of Nowila is reproduced on a broader scale when he has thousands of his own people killed for cowardice or simply perceived cowardice; as the story goes on, Chaka's rationalizations for his killing become weaker and weaker, until it seems that he seeks violence for its own reason.

One of the more fascinating moments of the story comes at the end, when Chaka is finally defeated and killed by his rivals. In his last moments, on the precipice of entering the world of the dead, he prophesies that while his rivals have defeated him, they will soon have to confront a much more dangerous enemy: the coming white man. In this, it's possible to see the story of Chaka not simply as the story a legendary king, but the formation of a culture and a kingdom who will be further defined by their conflict with the imperial powers of Europe.

With the addition of Lesotho, my "Countries Read" list is up to 110!