Edo's Souls by Stella Gaitano

It's been ten years I have been away from my village, the same age as my daughter Maria, whom we like to call Edo, named after her grandmother, who hovers around me like a thick, transparent cloud of air. I could only feel her presence, whereas I think my babies could see her more clearly. She'd play with them while I was busy with something else, like washing their tiny clothes covered in dust and poop. They'd be beating t he air with their hands and small legs, babbling and smiling, their wide black eyes following silhouettes floating in the air. I got the sense this was more than a child entertaining themselves with angels, as people say--the bond with this other being felt too strong. Maria-Edo was there, the children's grandmother, sitting on the edge of the bed, stopping my children--or what she probably saw as her own children reincarnated--from rolling off and hitting the floor.

Lucy-Eghino, a young girl living in the south of Sudan (which is now, you know, South Sudan) is the only one of her mother's children who survives. On her deathbed, Lucy's mother Maria, never having gotten over the struggles of her offspring, declares that Lucy's children will be the reincarnations of her own. But the children that Lucy will raise will see a different life than the traditional Sudanese village in which Lucy was raised. When violence breaks out, Lucy and her husband Marco must travel first to Juba, then to Khartoum in the north, a busy megalopolis where safety is only temporary, and civil war begins to approach. In Khartoum they live with Peter, another southerner raised by an Arab family in the north who has joined the military in order to find his imprisoned father, and his wife, Theresa. Together with Peter's extended family--who have a couple of other subplots related to the military oppression in Sudan in the 1970s and 80s--these four do their best to maintain the life of their family in the midst of upheaval.

I liked the first part of Edo's Souls. South Sudanese author Stella Gaitano draws on the traditions and legends of the country's small village to give us a sense of a woman with a deep-rooted power to transform the life of her child; we believe that Maria-Edo's--what, blessing? curse?--will come true. And when Lucy finds a baby on the road to Juba--the only survivor of a horrible killing--we understand it as a kind of fulfillment of the prophecy; what Maria-Edo has condemned Lucy to be is simply that, a mother. But the rest of the novel felt sadly familiar to me--a novel about political violence in the developing world where the violence hovers mostly somewhere offstage, operating opaquely. Gaitano makes Peter a kind of reluctant soldier, wavering over his multiple loyalties, but this fails to give us a real sense of what the violence in the Sudan is about or why. It's all very bloodless--not in a literal sense, of course. But the real problem is that, just as Lucy is disenchanted with the north to which she must flee, the novel becomes disenchanted as well. Gaitano tells us that the spirit of Maria-Edo watches over Lucy's children, but Lucy's children are more or less nonentities to the narrative, having been totally subsumed by the adventures of Peter, or Peter's sister and her Arab lover. It was a mistake, too, I think, for the novel to move from a third person that mystifies and enchants the narrative to a series of first-person narratives where the characters exhibit a shallow, plotty inner life. Oh well.

With the addition of South Sudan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 123!

Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Sonny Boy, a painter cannot paint, sculptor sculpt, photographer photograph, musician compose, not without the experience; your birth was to enhance my art. Art enhanced. Now how do I get rid of you? All evidence of you. Everything. I should kill you. Artfully, I've done it before. What a requiem I would compose.

Sonny Boy, I had to birth you. I thought you were the blessing of a uterine lining, gone for what they all told me was forever. The possibility of my redemption, a miracle from God, who found me at last.

Sonia Kurisu is an art student and lounge singer living in Las Vegas who has just given birth to her first son, Solomon--Sonny Boy. Sonny Boy is technically her first, but she is haunted by the spirits of three boys she killed before they were born: one appearing as pieces chopped up on a doctor's table, another as a drug-malformed "turtle boy," and another as he was buried, in a jar. Sonny Boy himself is no picnic, becoming another burden in a life of drugs and abuse that Sonia struggles to get away from. When he turns out to be severely autistic, nearly non-verbal, Sonia's family members converge upon her, dragging her back to Hawaii, and not always with kindness. Sonia struggles to love her deadbeat mother, her born-again sister, her meddling grandmother and aunt. Her connection is with her father, who sends lyrical letters from whatever part of the world--Japan, Nepal, Argentina--he happens to be visiting. His quasi-abandonment, of course, informs Sonia's fantasies of getting rid of Sonny Boy for good.

I have a high regard for Yamanaka's work. I thought Blu's Hanging was a near-masterpiece, and although I didn't like Wild Meat and Bully Burgers as much, its final scenes have stayed with me for a long time. Father of the Four Passages, in fact, has a similar ending, in which Sonia is provoked by Sonny Boy--who has some sort of mystical powers to speak without speaking, it seems, though that's all a little bit muddled--to find restitution for the three dead children, including turning the baby-in-the-jar to ash on top of Mauna Kea. Father of the Four Passages differs from those other books in that its protagonist is an adult, not a child, and Yamanaka brings a much more poetic and staccato style to it, eschewing the earthy and pop-cultural aspects of those other two books. It's kind of a mess, and the end is supposed to bring it all back together by giving the various pieces of the book a kind of direction, toward atonement, restitution, healing. And that mostly works, but I did find the experience of reading Father of the Four Passages to be a much more whiplash-inducing experience, and though the story coheres, the book didn't necessarily cohere for me. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

When our daughters were small, I'd sometimes dump a bunch of building toys on the floor (Legos and wooden blocks and parts of other sets) and we'd sit there for hours, listening to music and talking and absentmindedly making something. There was no plan; we were just putting this with that, because we liked the way it looked. But pretty soon, a structure would start to appear. The ramps were leading to that platform, and there was a cool little space under that platform, an excellent place for that plastic dragon and Lego plumber to live. The final product was complex, and I think you could say it had "meaning," but it wasn't a meaning we'd intentionally put there; no way could we have planned out something so strange or anticipated the exact effect it would have on us later when, having forgotten we'd made it, we walked past it. That is, the thing we would have planned would have been less. The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can only do if it has legitimately surprised its creator.

George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain combines several short works by Russian masters--Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol--with short essays explaining how and why Saunders thinks the story works the way it does. These pieces come out of a class that Saunders teaches on the Russian short story, and while the class might not be a workshop class in the truest sense, it's clear that what Saunders really cares about is thinking of these stories as a writer, someone who wants to imitate their graces and surprises effectively. I think sometimes that anyone can think about a piece of fiction as a reader, but if you start thinking about it as a writer you'll find that you see much more--and for better or worse, you can never really stop. So whether the class is a writing workshop or not, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is a book for writers.

First things first: one has to admit that the stories Saunders has chosen are really good. There's no surprise there, I guess. But it's been a while since I've visited the Russian short story--which I also took a class on in college--and I really was delighted by these stories, which are so different from one another, but which have a kind of earthy, earnest pre-Revolution "Russianness" that is unmistakable. One of them, "The Nose" by Gogol, will be familiar to many, as it was to me, but it's still a highlight, a funny absurd story of a man chasing his own nose around town that shouldn't work, but it does. (Saunders describes the story as functioning with a kind of audaciousness, making the absurdity work by pointedly illustrating that it shouldn't work, thereby getting a little grace from a skeptical reader.) But I had never read, for instance, Chekhov's "The Darling," about a woman who gives her whole self to a series of lovers, or Tolstoy's simple morality tale "Alyosha the Pot." (There are more stories by Chekhov here than any other, and I think that's no accident--he really was the genius of the short story.)

One thing that struck me as being rather funny is how straightforward the writing advice here is. Though Saunders is often associated with a kind of topical futurism and social critique, when it comes to teaching writing, he has a kind of old-fashioned fuddy-duddiness, which, if I'm honest, I think as a teacher I share. He takes seriously, for instance, the idea that a story should contain something like "rising action"--a phrase that might make a postmodern bristle. One specific point he makes that I really appreciate, and has made me think about my own writing, is that a good story needs to "always be escalating," and while I don't know if that's true, I do think that it will often explain why an otherwise well-written story seems not to work. I appreciated, too, his thoughts on how "The Gooseberries" and "Alyosha the Pot" succeed by a kind of thoughtful reticence, whether neither Chekhov nor Tolstoy puts too heavy a hand on the moral questions at the heart of the story. That is, I think, easier said than done, and one must admit that to be a writer like Chekhov or Tolstoy you have to have a kind of genius insight into the nature of human beings at baseline that few possess. Nonetheless, for us ordinary Iosips, there's a lot here worth pondering.

G. by John Berger

I despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries.

G. is the illegitimate son of an American divorcee and an Italian candy manufacturer who grows up in England. That makes him, in some sense, both no one and everyone, an heir to the international turbulence of the late 19th century that, as we know and he does not yet, will blow up into the conflagration of World War I. Most of his life is marked not by politics, but sex, beginning with his seduction by his own aunt in that English country house and continuing on through a series of reckless affairs with everyone from chambermaids to Austrian noblewomen. But love for G. is represented by the face of a Roman woman who protected him when, as a child, he escaped a visit to his father and ended up in the barricades of a nationalist uprising. So perhaps sex and revolution are tied together from the very beginning, something that G. will have to relearn when, after years of tomcatting around, he casually accepts a reckless request to do a little light spycraft in the city of Trieste, where Serbian nationalists are beginning to become suspicious not only of their Austro-Hungarian overlords, but Italians like G.--if that's what he is--as well.

John Berger was better known as an art critic whose Ways of Seeing (which I have not read) has been overwhelmingly influential. From time to time, G. reads like a novel by an essayist, who frequently interrupts the narrative to expound on the various emotional and visual dynamics that occur between G. and his several lovers. (One of Berger's most enduring ideas is the male gaze, which says something like "men watch women while women watch themselves being watched," and that idea is all over G. as well.) Berger isn't hiding his hand; the "I" here is so strong that Berger will often compare the events of the novel to things that (presumably) happen in his own life, or baldly declare the struggles of composing the text: "I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent." The dryness of Berger's essayistic style contrast in an effective and interesting way with the heedlessness of G., who follows his passions at every turn. The reader identifies more strongly with that "I" than it does G., a man who we suspect would probably be incapable of thinking very articulately about what he's doing, or why, or how he fits into the larger context of European history as it passes from the age of revolution to the age of total war.

For all that, there is a novel here, and an interesting one. More or less, it can be split into three segments, the first being G.'s conception and childhood and the second being a long middle set in the town of Domodossola, where a friend and fellow pilot is attempting to be the first to cross the Alps in an airplane. In a way I won't overexplain he both succeeds and fails, and this perhaps sets the tone for the third part, with G. in Trieste. G. enlists a Bosnian peasant woman as his plus-one to a ball where he intends to seduce the aforementioned Austrian noblewoman, causing a terrific scandal. Is G.'s act political, or not? Is he acting merely out of lust for the Bosnian woman, or is he intending to indict the Austrians by shoving the political iniquities and instabilities of their rule in their faces? Are political and revolutionary deeds acts of will or are they something closer to lust, rising from someplace deeper within? These are the questions that make G., I thought, a strange and provocative work.

Little Constructions by Anna Burns

Do you know this syndrome? Do you have it? I'll tell you. You're having a hard time, say, because something not very nice once happened to you. It was a big thing, and although it's supposed to be over, in your body and in your head and from the way you now look out on the world, it's not bloody over, it's still bloody going on. Or maybe it wasn't a big thing. Maybe it was a series of little things, most of them below the level of police CAD reference number material, but if you add them together, plus feather in the timescale, they amount to one hell of a cumulative assault.

But poor you. It's too late. By now you're infantilised. By now you've lost your language. By now you're no longer capable of speaking about what happened, for didn't you try and try and nobody could hear? You're left swinging to one extreme therefore, which is clutching on to reluctant people, babbling incoherencies, or else sitting alone at your kitchen table, driven into silence, unable to tune into anything at all.

That's because of evil. That's what evil does.

Little Constructions opens with Jetty Doe, a member of Belfast's notorious Doe crime family, barging into a gun shop and demanding a gun. She takes with her a handful of the wrong ammo--buckshot for Kalashnikov--and heads off to shoot her lover, the husband of her sister, crime lord John Doe. This sets of a series of events that reverberate not just in the future but somehow in the past, beginning with the complete dissolution of the gunshop owner, Tom Spaders, still reeling from being mugged by a group of children seven years before. From there we're introduced to all the members of the Doe family, who are named like Duggars: there's Jetty, of course, but also Jotty, and Julie, and JanetJoshuatine, and JerryJudges and Joe and Johnjoe, and so on, and so on. Not all of them are literally Does, and those that are literally Does occupy a vague place in the family hierarchy. Who is a sister, and who is a wife? Who is a daugher? And what happens when all these roles get mixed up?

Anna Burns' first novel shares certain recognizable qualities with her breakout book, Milkman, as well as another book of hers I enjoyed, No Bones. All are about the ways that a climate of constant violence can warp the brain and prevent one from seeing things as they really are. Little Constructions attempts to make that point even more severely than the other two, by presenting a kind of impossible-to-follow shaggy story, moving backward and forward from the point of Jetty storming the gunshop, filling in details, going on digressions, casting doubt on those details, etc., etc. It has a number of unforgettable images and ideas: John Doe's son hiding in the suit of armor as John assaults his daughter; the many, many coffins that Doe buries, each time claiming (persuading even himself, perhaps) that he's burying a beloved family member. Though these images touch on political and sectarian violence in Belfast, it seems clear that Doe is just a petty criminal, and yet that has given him a kind of nobility that has driven him and the rest of his family crazy, like a bunch of Habsburgs.

I enjoyed Little Constructions for a little while. It has a manic energy I really enjoyed, and I was fascinated by the bodiless "I" that Burns employs as a narrator. Is it a bystander? A ghost? One of those fantastical constructions that the Does use to justify and smooth over the contradictions of their insane lives? But in the end, it was just too confusing. I can barely explain what happens in the book's second half, and what I can explain, I certainly can't put in order. (Is the big blow-up that happens at the end a day after Jetty storms the gunshop? Or years later? And who exactly ends up dead?) It's all intentional, of course; Burns is trying hard to keep you from finding your footing in this topsy-turvy world. But I felt that it was those other, later books where she managed to find a better balance of realism and hysteria.

The Suffrage of Elvira by V. S. Naipaul

Foam's ebullience depressed Harbans more. The bargaining with Baksh had shaken him and he feared that Chittaranjan too might demand stiffer terms. Moreover, he was nervous about the Dodge; and the sweet drink and rock cakes he had had were playing hell with his inside.

'You shy, Mr Harbans,' Foam said. 'I know how it is. But you going to get use to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain't going to vote for you.'

Harbans shook his head sadly.

Foam settle into the angle of the seat and the door. 'Way I see it is this. In Trinidad this democracy is a brand new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.' He dropped his voice solemnly: 'I respect people like you, you know, Mr Harbans, doing this thing for the first time.'

Trinidad, at the time of V. S. Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira, is a newly independent and democratic state. Elections are being held, but no one has ever stood for them before, much less managed a campaign. There are no polls, no TV advertisements, no rallies--but there are vans, loudspeakers, and lots and lots of wheeling and dealing. The novel centers on an election between Sujurpat "Pat" Harbans, a Hindu merchant, and a Black Trinidadian known simply as "Preacher." The racial breakdown of the vote in diverse Trinidad is obvious, but there are many more votes--belonging to Muslims and "Spanish"--left up for grabs. Harbans enlists the young Foreman "Foam" Baksh as his campaign manager, which sets off a series of comic enterprises that mostly end with Harbans writing a check or a petrol voucher. Someone is getting rich off this election, but it isn't the candidate.

Naipaul became a much more "serious" writer with his later works, which are so often thoughtful and beautifully written investigations into the postcolonial spirit. But for my money, he was never better than at the beginning of his career, when he wrote these comedies set in Trinidad. The Suffrage of Elvira sits nicely between Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that made his career--all being vernacular-heavy novels that depict small-potatoes Trinidadian strivers. The irony from all of them comes from the presentation of Trinidad as a remote outpost; the election between Harbans and Preacher may share certain elements with English parliamentary elections, but England's a long ways away, and how many MPs owe their seats to fears that a puppy is imbued with obeah witchcraft? (This subplot, in which Foam's little brother nicks a newborn puppy and hides it in their storage room, leading to fantastic rumors, is maybe the funniest thing in the whole book.) It seems to me that Naipaul in his later work explored the anger and resentment that emerge in the spirit of the postcolonial subject, who knows how little he measures up to his colonizers, but these books are lighthearted because no one really seems to know or care.

"We is a creeping nation," Foam tells Harbans, and I think that's probably pretty close to Naipaul's view as well. There's something admirable, even honorable, about Trinidad's first forays into the world of electoral politics. But Naipaul captures well how, no matter the size of the country or how long it's been a democracy, elections turn not on clashing ideals but petty personal conflicts and jealousies, as with the breadfruit tree whose roots are in the yard of Ramlogan the tavernkeeper, but which drops its fruit in the yard of Chittaranjan the goldsmith. And it captures how everybody, even down to the lowest taxi driver wanting his ten dollars in petrol vouchers, wants to get his thumb in the pie.

Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine

Though Jody required the younger one to stay indoors during the day, it was typical for neighbors to see Mice hurtling down Reef Way or through neighborhood side streets at sunset. Perhaps the girl's racing around in the evenings satisfied a need.

In the small apartments those months, I watched the half-sisters near-always, impatient to be part of their togetherness and clashes both. Soon after moving into the apartment, I acquired the habit of breathing them in, of trying to draw goodness from one sister, then the other. Among family, satiating cuddles, from what I understood, could arise at breakneck speed: I waited.

Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 is about two half-sisters, living in south Florida after the death of their mother. One is Jody, the elder, and the other is Mice, whose improbable name comes from her pale white skin, cotton-colored hair, and thick glasses. The sisters are alike in some ways, so much so that they often seem like the same person, but in others, they are quite different, Jody the anxious caretaker and Mice in her own world, making crystal radios and hiding in wells. The girls, and Mice especially, are the subject of much gossip in their small suburban outpost of Miami, and though opinions differ, many seem to believe that there's something not quite right about Mice, that her strange appearance is connected somehow to her diffident nature and her unwillingness to work. Mice is tormented regularly by a series of teenagers who are simply known as "the teenagers," although, in a stroke that shows just how weird the novel is, one of them turns out to be a 28-year-old who's just kind of hanging out at the high school.

By far the most interesting thing about Mice 1961, for me, is the position of the narrator, Girtle, who occupies a strange kind of position in the girls' household as a maid or factotum, doing odd jobs and cleaning. The truth is that Girtle (what a name!) seems to have inveigled her way into the house by simply asking to be there; her origins are obscure, though she tells us that she once hopped a fence to escape an orphanage. Girtle longs to be part of the sisterly bond between Jody and Mice, and she even tries to peel Mice away from Jody by way of promising to take her to a remote cabin. As a narrator, Girtle manages to disappear, often very literally, hiding and skulking around and trying not to be noticed. Much of what Girtle is able to report is because she is literally unseen, not noticed by the townspeople, and often not by Jody and Mice, either. More interesting still, Girtle has a recurrent premonition that someone she calls "the helper" is soon to arrive, a figure who will come to further Mice's narrative as the protagonist of the story, perhaps by taking her away from Girtle. When a smooth-talking James Dean type with a secret connection to (what we know will be) the Bay of Pigs invasion, we're not even shocked that Girtle turns out to have been correct.

Mice 1961 has so many fascinating parts, and it's written in a slightly alien prose that keeps the narrative vigorous and captivating. But why is the middle of it so tedious? A huge section of the book takes place during a town party at a local bakery, where the villagers come in bearing cakes and pies (and in one case, "blue water"), gossiping about Mice and Jody but all sorts of other people as well. Some of these townspeople are memorable and some are not, but together they seem as if Levine is trying to give us a sense of the somewhat cloistered town in which the sisters live, one of those mid-century commuter towns that end up as a kind of panopticon of good manners. Girtle records it all fastidiously, but I felt again and again that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. Like Jody, I kept wondering: Where's Mice? 

Carnality by Lina Wolff

We knew what kind of show it was, my wife and I, so we've got no grounds to play the innocent. It's just you'd think with a nun behind it there'd be limits, some kind of safety net. Not because I'm a believer. I don't believe in any religious communion or system. But an institution has always got something to lose, if only its self-image, which is why there are things you never believe it capable of doing. What we'd both heard about Lucia was that she could work miracles. I don't believe in miracles, but Soledad insisted that a miracle was exactly what we needed at that point: some vast, unbelievable miracle that transformed everything.

Bennedith is a Swedish travel writer on a month-long paid trip to Madrid. Looking for meaning, she takes on another role caring for a man who suffers from severe Alzheimer's--gratis. At a bar, she meets a man named Mercuro who inveigles his way into her life, and her furnished flat, telling her a strange story of woe: having cheated on his wife Soledad, he turned to a television series called Carnality, helmed by the mysterious Miss Pink and Mister Blue and their unseen patroness, a nun named Sor Lucia, to help him fix the rift between them. Sor Lucia's solution is simple: because Soledad needs a heart transplant, Mercuro can fix what he has done by offering her his own heart. In fact, by signing the waivers for the show he has already made the agreement to do so, and it is in fleeing the pursuing transplanters that Mercuro has ended up in Bennedith's arms. Bennedith is at first repulsed by Mercuro, then compelled. His own story of irrevocably fucking up has some resonances with her own, not least of which the way she shamefully loses her job with the Alzheimer's patient. So it's no surprise that they end up in each other's arms, literally.

The title Carnality takes in all kinds of fleshy meaning. There's Mercuro's carnal lust, of course, but there's the carnality, too, in the sense of carne, meat, as in the heart that Mercuro is compelled to cut out and give away. The last half of the book is a long series of letters from Sor Lucia, the patroness of Carnality, explaining to Bennedith (who is in jail after a series of complicated events involving a reckless Swedish party boater--go figure) her childhood as the stepdaughter of a cruel butcher during the Spanish Civil War. Sor Lucia's missing thumb is rumored to be from a pig's bite, but she explains that it was actually cut off by a man seeking vengeance for her stepfather's crimes. It's this experience--butchering, being butchered--that makes Lucia an asset at the convent, and gives her a kind of necessarily mercilessness. The story of the TV show Carnality is a story of that mercilessness, although one can see in Lucia's letters to Bennedith that cracks have begun to appear in the nun's moral certitude. Moral questions, Carnality, suggest, are tied up with the body as well as the soul.

What I liked most about Carnality was how unsettled it was. It constantly seemed to be transforming from one kind of book into another one, and I never really knew where it was going to go next: from Bennedith's listlessness and ennui to Mercuro's bizarre tale to their adventure with the evil boater, then to Lucia's letters and history. So I was a little bit disappointed, as I suppose would be inevitable, at the way the various threads were tied together at the end. I actually found that I wanted Carnality to remain mysterious, perhaps a fiction of Mercuro's head--Bennedith has never heard of it--rather than getting the detailed history of how Lucia came to be at the head of the mysterious television show. To Wolff's credit, she ties everything together skillfully, and the end brings the various themes of mercy and violence together really well--but I wonder if there was another version of the novel that stayed as unsettled and weird as it was at the beginning.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

The Whatsisname was now at a loss for what to do. He knew his mission was essential to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why. The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals. He thought if he took too long avenging the victims in whose name he was acting, the body parts he had taken from them would decompose in situ. It would be the end of him, and he would be free of this world.

A suicide bomb goes off in American-occupied Baghdad. Hadi, a local junk merchant, picks up the pieces of bodies and stitches them together into a single corpse, thinking that perhaps the authorities will give the corpse a real burial, unlike the pieces of people that litter the street. But the next day, the corpse has disappeared, animated--as we learn--by the spirit of another victim of the bombing, who has been separated from his own body. Soon, Hadi realizes that the creature he's made is connected to a series of killings in the news. The creature, now known as Criminal X or Whatsisname, is busy killing the people who are responsible for the deaths of those of whose parts he is constructed. When one part is avenged, it falls off, and Whatsisname must take new pieces from the dead, but this only complicates his mission, mixing up the identities of victim and criminal, and soon he even resorts to killing people himself.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is an attempt to capture the cruelty and widespread violence of Iraq under the American occupation. The Americans, the displaced Baathists, the religious fundamentalists in al-Qaeda, are all are responsible for widespread slaughter that allow something like Whatsisname to emerge. At first, it's an image of the lack of respect and dignity afforded to the dead in a place where murder has become commonplace--what Hadi desires for the corpse is not revenge, but simple burial. But soon it becomes an image of the way that violence proliferates and metastasizes, expands past the limits one might think to place on it. You can see Saadawi's attempt to capture the landscape of a particular time and place in the large cast of characters that converge around the creature, policemen, journalists, astrologers, etc., etc. There are Iraqi Christians and Jews as well as Muslims; in one funny and pointed scene, a poster of a hadith is torn away to reveal a statue of the Virgin Mary; when the statue is destroyed it reveals a Jewish menorah. There is more, Saadawi seems to be saying, to Baghdad than violence; there are traces of a pluralistic society that has curdled in the face of fundamentalism and war.

I thought this novel was fairly effective. The image of the monster is clever and apt; Saadawi avoids getting too much into the explanatory weeds of how the creature is born or operates, but the way in which it is consistently regenerated by violence--the very violence it seeks vengeance for--is a fresh way to express an old and true idea. There were times I wish that the narrative were focused more on Whatsisname and less on the constellation of supporting characters--I found it difficult to care about the journalist Mahmoud's lust toward his boss' paramour, for instance--but for the most part, it worked for me.

With the addition of Iraq, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 122!

The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant

The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous. But if I could pull it off, I'd land in rare company. Any horseman worth his salt would agree: the Pony Express is an apex of American horsemanship and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental. And so I talked myself into it. Some people look for answers in a library; I'd look for mine between the ears of a horse.

The Pony Express was really something: ten days to deliver a piece of mail between Missouri and California. It took a collection of brave and skilled riders, some not much more than kid, and by writer Will Grant's calculus, thousands of horses, each of whom was pushed to cover about ten miles between stage stops. It's an even more amazing feat when you consider that, when Grant rode the length of the Pony Express with his horses Badger and Chicken Fry, as recounted in The Last Ride of the Pony Express, it took well over one hundred days. Grant's goal, as he puts it, is not just to ride the Pony Express trail to understand the West as it was, but the West as it is: meeting with the ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders who still make up the West's human geography today. Along the way, he explores the history of the American West, but also the problems that face the west today: feral horses, water shortages, and factory farming. 

I enjoyed The Last Ride of the Pony Express; there's almost no chance I wouldn't. I love travelogues, and I love the American West. So it might be considered a kind of praise when I say: this book should have been a lot longer. Grant skillfully weaves three threads together, the physical landscape of the journey, the human landscape--the people--and the history, but I often felt that I never got enough of any one. More than that, I'm thinking of William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse, about an equally massive undertaking, crossing the entire United States by water. A book like this ought to have the kind of heft and stature that the feat does. Instead, it felt to me like the experience of the ride was left somewhere outside the page. Grant explains that we don't really know that much about the Pony Express, which existed for only eighteen months, so part of that might be the lightness of the historical record. Surely part of it also the pressures of the modern publishing industry, who aren't interested in Least Heat-Moon sized tomes.

OK, enough quibbling. I really did enjoy the way that Grant brings two visions of the West, one modern and one historical, to bear on his incredibly journey. The most interesting and human part of the book might actually be Grant's sojourn among the Peruvian sheepherders of Nevada, whose hospitality is unparalleled, even in a book where people regularly open up their ranches for Grant and his horses to camp in. That's a vision of a new West, but also not so different (as Grant explains) from the Basque sheepherders who once dominated the area. Ultimately, the book gives us a sense of a frontier that is still changing, even as it remains one of the United States' most enduring places of legend.