REVIEWED:
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus. Knopf, 304 PP. $24.95.

Published in Issue 27

With his second novel, The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has diverged from the path he trod while becoming one of America’s best-known experimental fiction writers. He’s written a plague fantasy told in first-person by a middle-aged, Jewish husband and father living in the suburbs. It is cold and coherent in its execution, with one narrator and a clear plot, and reading it is a crushing sort of experience. It’s a deliberate shift for Marcus into both traditional storytelling and humorless despondency, one he seems to have chosen with care.

It is wholly unlike The Age of Wire and String, Marcus’ first book. There, forty-some darkly absurd short stories form a guidebook to an apocalyptic ur-America, where soil, air, cloth, and food seem to have strange religious significance. Marcus’s second book and first novel, Notable American Women, featured real and fake blurbs, mixing quotes from George Saunders with one from “Ben’s father.” The Flame Alphabet shows none of the sort of fun that characterized the first two books. It is such a dramatic turn for Marcus and such a remorseless tragedy that if it had been published with a self-referential blurb, it could only have been an earnest warning from the author: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

The book begins with the narrator, known only as Sam, getting in the car with his wife, Claire to leave behind their daughter forever. An unreal plague is destroying human communication, and in turn, American society. “It was early December. Year of the sewn-up mouth,” Sam tells us. The plague is first understood to be “language toxicity” found in the speech of Jewish children, although it later affects all adults who hear or read children’s language. Eventually, all efforts to communicate cause adults intense suffering, as the body undergoes “Language death, when the body is saturated.” Sam comes to see words as “a long, slow venom,” and says “that this poison flowed from Jewish children alone, at least at first, we had no reason to think. That suffering would find us in even more novel ways, we had probably always suspected.”

As Sam and Claire endure symptoms akin to radiation sickness, his bitterness devolves into caustic humor.“Maybe this was the quiet before the really fucking quiet,” he says. Sam and Claire are quickly and implausibly separated. Sam drives north alone through New York State and winds up at an institution called Forsythe, where he is forced to search for a cure under the watch of the book’s villain, an anti-Semite named LeBov. Later, away from the facility, Sam muses alone about his wish to have his family back together.

In looking for an explanation for a book like this from Marcus, one that lacks his previous quirks, formal brilliance, and expansive humor, the most plausible conclusion is that he wrote it in order to establish the early history of the world in which his other books are set, to explain the plague that destroyed America and brought about that strange, Dust Bowl era.

One key flaw is that Marcus spends far too much time in the first half of the book cataloguing Sam and Claire’s immense physical suffering without showing how they feel about it. There are scores of sentences like: “In the waiting room neighbors stared at their pee-soaked laps, hacked into fistfuls of cloth. Some went shirtless from pain,” and “Something streamed down my legs when I coughed . . .” Sam’s narration grows ever more obtuse, as if he must toughen up to survive, and his motives and true feelings are given short shrift. The lack of focus on Sam’s feelings creates immense distance between him and the reader, a distance that feels at best like stubbornness on Marcus’s part, at worst an unwillingness to do the kind of work required when presenting a traditional story about a loving and devoted family man. Occasionally Sam insists he’s acting out of love for his family, but his actions and thoughts shift so suddenly—later cheating on his wife, no mention of his daughter for long stretches—that his devotion seems too shallow to even been excused as an ironic pose.

From there the book becomes a jumble. In the second half Sam is shown as fatally isolated, a persecuted man testing letters in search of an alphabet that will save humanity and restore his family to him. Human trials kill hundreds at the Forsythe facility during “speech fever treatments.” Marcus includes historical research and interesting experiments—quotes from Ovid, an alphabet made of ice, Rebus writing—yet it amounts to nothing in this strange world reminiscent of an art installation, or a Burroughs-esque dreamscape, with bird-size moths, soldiers wearing foam helmets to keep out sound, and coils of wire placed in human mouths. Some small hope comes from a “new Hebrew lettering paradigm,” then fades, as it must, apparently in line with the book’s locked trajectory.

At every turn Marcus puts Sam’s thoughts on the darkest path possible, the only justification for this gloom being that this book is meant to explain the plague that wiped out America. Marcus mercilessly grinds his narrator into the ground, literally: isolation and numbness are the only ways left for Sam to survive in such a nightmare place. Marcus’ vision follows old tropes about apocalypse and feel very similar to those Michel Houellebecq uses in his novel The Possibility of an Island, which also relies on terse language driven by nihilistic self-loathing. But where Houellebecq’s characters feel real, Sam’s story doesn’t sound like that of a living character. It’s a tough-guy pose driven by a desire to believe, or to make us believe, he saw it as his job as a man to assume blame for the plague that ended life as we knew it.

At times Marcus’s language is given some air through quick, short chapters that deliver the blow-by-blow of Sam’s cheerless existence. The sentences feel like hard-won prose for Marcus. In a scene before Sam and Claire are separated they are at home in their terribly afflicted state, dripping pus and with blackened gums. Claire, in a rare moment of strength, rolls over to see if Sam wants to have sex. Sam describes her as, “Seeking, it would seem, someone to leak on.” This is disciplined disgust, as unyielding to sentimentality as Houellebecq, but without the rants or manic highs. There might be grim beauty in passages like this one, except that the book is one long dark passage:

Sitting with my wife, whose disgust pulsed over me, I laughed to myself over these assessments, thoughts of a final or irresolvable darkness. . . . The side effects of fighting, the side effects of knowing nothing, the side effects of being done with it and somehow, for no reason I could detect, still alive. One uses one’s deathbed energy to project meaning where none can be found. How does the species possibly benefit from such an action?

Marcus also places Sam in a world rife with anti-Semitism, much of his despair attributable to his fear of persecution. In fact Sam and Claire worship underground: they are “Reconstructionist Jews following a program modified by Mordecai Kaplan,” who practice a “covert method of devotion.” This involves worship by a man and his wife in a small hut over “a Jew hole” in the woods, where an orange cable comes up through the ground. By using a fleshy mechanical “listener” device, or “Moses mouth,” Sam can tap into sermons that are broadcast through the wire by rabbis. A rabbi Sam listens to via the orange cable encourages Jews to embrace blame for the plague. “An incredible opportunity has arisen,” Rabbi Burke says. “We have the chance to take the blame for something extraordinary, an incomprehensible affliction.” These messages trigger thoughts of a greater purpose for Sam. “In blame is a chance to step into responsibility, to make of our bodies absorbent parcels for the accusations of others. . . . He insisted that blame can have no literal meaning; there really is no such thing when you love the Name, our term for Hashem.”

The visions Sam presents are like some of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes come to life, with Sam propping himself up as the receptacle of all hatred toward Jews. “We had, it seemed to me, succeeded perfectly at being misunderstood,” he says. “Again and again our huts were surveilled, seized, burned, for fear that the Jew was drinking something too important out of these holes, drinking directly from God’s mind, eating a pure alphabet that he alone could stomach. There were the fearful rumors. Such an apparatus, if true, was too good for Jews alone.” This fantastic take on the poisonous idea that Jews tap into secret knowledge they keep from the Gentile world becomes part of the plot later when LeBov tortures Jews at the Forsythe lab, forcing them to search for a cure by tapping into the mysterious underground orange cable together.

Gradually in The Flame Alphabet after so many narrative choices that drop Sam down darker and darker holes, the novel starts to feel false. Marcus’s forebears—among them Burroughs, Houellebecq, Beckett—balance painful absurdity, obscene cruelty, and hyperviolence with the human urge to overcome terror by laughing sometimes, even if the laughter was only in despair. Marcus’s first two books had that kind of balance, making them feel more truthful, but Sam’s resolute despondency feels false. After Sam’s life and everyone else’s have been ruined and the world is a sickened mess, he even goes so far as to wonder why “was it not worse? Why was the person himself not gutted of thought?” Sam’s gloom after years of living alone becomes empty and contrived; it banishes all humor, hope, or notions of salvation. In The Flame Alphabet it feels as if every time Marcus was required to make a narrative choice, he opted for gloom.

Matthew Jakubowski is a freelance writer and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Philadelphia.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
War Diary by Ingeborg Bachmann. Edited by Hans Höller (trans. Mike Mitchell). Seagull Books, 108 pp. $15.00.

Published in Issue 27

This English edition of a small German volume (published in 2010 by Suhrkamp) retains its slightly misleading title and authorial attribution: the “war diary” kept by the great Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann in 1944-45 takes up only fifteen pages of the book. According to the textual notes, the extant diary entries were typewritten on six pages, presumably from original, now lost, handwritten copies. (It isn’t clear when or why the transcription was produced.) In those pages, she describes, among other things, the development of a relationship at the end of the war with a Jewish soldier in the occupying British army, Jack Hamesh. The majority of the book is made up of Hamesh’s letters to Bachmann after emigrating to Palestine; the remaining pages consist of a series of annotations and an informed afterword by Hans Höller. While the whole volume is clearly valuable to Bachmann readers, who must be accustomed to fragments at this point, it would be fortunate if the letters could also find an audience among those interested in Jewish and Zionist life writing.

The diary entries comprise two separate, episodic accounts of the end of the war in Klagenfurt, when Bachmann was 18. In the first account, she describes the chaotic circumstances under which she must, like any 18-year-old, plan her future: for example, she signs away her right to go to college in Austria as the price of enrollment in a teacher’s college, thereby exempting herself from military service. The terms of this unfortunate bargain are short-lived: in the fullness of time she will attend several Austrian universities and receive her doctorate. Smaller escapes, though, punctuate these earlier entries. In one instance, the students of the town are sent out at 7 am to dig trenches for the defense of Klagenfurt—”[a]ll the children were there for the digging but not a single teacher”—and are left exposed and defenseless, near factories, when the air raid sirens begin. Full of disgust and outrage at the mendacity of the teachers, Bachmann flees the work site alone on her bicycle. She then refuses to return to the teachers’ college, assuming (correctly, it seems) that she and another deserting friend won’t be missed. Closer to home, she is more calmly defiant. She writes, “I have firmly resolved to carry on reading when the bombs come”—citing Rilke’s Book of Hours and Baudelaire (with minor errors) in French—and then reflects:

Perhaps it’s sinful just to sit and look at the sun. But I can’t go back down in the shelter any more, for hours, with the water running down the walls, and it gets so stuffy it almost makes you faint. You’re not allowed to talk because of the air but still the dull, mute masses in there are unbearable. I find the idea of perhaps perishing down there with the lot of them, like a herd of cattle, horrifying. At least in the garden. At least in the sunshine.

Bachmann famously described the entry of Hitler’s troops into Klagenfurt as the end of her childhood. From these pages, though, it isn’t clear what immediately followed. Here she seems to exist in a liminal zone between self-determination and powerlessness: she has worked out tactics of flight, but not full resistance or solidarity with others. This is an understandable response to an unclear, variable threat. Her good luck has spared her any immediate physical danger; the authorities she encounters are despicable but petty. But the bombings are quite real, as is the threat from the invading Russian army. She concludes these wartime passages with an uncanny image of sharing her bed with her childhood doll, who “can’t say ‘Mama’ any more, nor can I.” “No, there’s no point in talking to grown-ups anymore,” she laments. What will follow this silence: adulthood, or death?

In the subsequent diary entries, she continues to alternate between cynicism about social norms and forthright enthusiasm. When she meets Hamesh in the process of obtaining an identity card (she describes him as “short and on the ugly side”), he asks her peremptorily about her involvement in the Bund deutscher Mädel, the Aryan girls’ organization. She is terribly flustered: while her involvement was fleeting, she can only nod in affirmation, assuming a disavowal would be taken as an admission. She does manages to deny that she was a leader when prompted, but “simply can’t understand why you blush and tremble when you’re telling the truth.” This puzzlement becomes a refrain—she neither knows why Hamesh wants to speak to her again, nor why she’s so nervous when talking to him. When they talk about literature, her confusion and uncertainty immediately clears up: literature is solid ground. Intellectual camaraderie forms the basis for their friendship and affection; it also appears to furnish an introduction to philosophy and social theory for the young Bachmann, whose reading has mostly been literary.

The status of their relationship remains uncertain and somewhat fraught. She claims that everyone was shocked at her “going out with the Jew”; she takes pains both to tell her mother that the relationship is innocent, and to condemn the public bigotry: “I told her I’d walk up and down through Vellach and through Hermagor ten times over with him, even if everyone gets in a stew about it, especially then.” Behind both protestations are intense, inchoate feelings:

We talked until evening and he kissed my hand before he left. No one’s ever kissed my hand before. I’m out of my mind I’m so happy and after he’d gone I climbed up the apple tree, it was already dark and I cried my eyes out and thought I never wanted to wash my hand again. . . . This is the loveliest summer of my life, and even if I live to be a hundred it will still be the loveliest spring and summer.

This evocation not of adolescent love, but of its precursor—wild joy in oneself and others, in defiance of all lessons and social expectations—infects the reader with uneasy delight. As becomes quietly apparent in the Hamesh letters, it doesn’t seem to have made the transition to love. We don’t have Bachmann’s replies, but they must have been disappointingly scant. The force within her euphoria seems, in the end, to have been more basic. toward the end of the “loveliest summer” paragraph she writes: “I’m alive, I’m alive! Oh God, to be free and alive, even without shoes, without food, without stockings.” In his afterword Hans Höller takes pains to link passages in the diary to other writings of Bachmann’s, particularly a section of The Book of Franza in which a similar encounter with a soldier plays out with a difference. He resists, though, a deeper account of how all of these experiences serve to build the literary world of love and death—and of impulsive, passionate childhood and an educated, fragmented maturity—of Bachmann’s entire oeuvre. The bookish quasi-romance is indeed a pivotal experience: finding an interlocutor, a(nother) reader, to share the literary garden, whether or not the bombs fall, whether or not there is anything to be done for community, country or any of a multitude of others. While Bachmann and Hamesh read Marx together, it seems that they will work out the answer to that final question differently.

In an epilogue not present in the German edition, Hans Höller reports that he was able to uncover much of what little information about Jack Hamesh survives. We learn through the diary that he was brought to England from Vienna through the Kindertransport, and that he joined the British Army. Apparently he was born in great poverty and apprenticed to a cobbler at the time of his flight from Vienna in 1938, when he moved to Palestine; he worked on several kibbutzim before joining the army, and returned to Palestine after being discharged. His lack of formal education—which he laments in one of the letters—makes him a surprising intellectual mentor for Bachmann, and it may be that she overstates the significance of their shared literary interests in his life. He rarely mentions books in his letters, which are frankly affectionate and often emotionally raw. More often, he uses the letters as an occasion to reflect on Israel/Palestine, the fate of nations, and his own uncertain destiny and efforts to be optimistic. In an early letter he admits that they didn’t get to know one another particularly well; when he describes Bachmann later as “A great woman, a brilliant researcher, and an ideal mother,” it is both touching and comical. The letters, over time, begin to register the gap between Europe and Israel in reality and imagination. It is hard to imagine what Bachmann made of his statement that “Not one Arab has had to leave his land” in the course of Israeli nation-building; but one also wonders how sincerely Hamesh intended his assurances that her difficulties were much more severe than his own.

Bachmann is a highly performative writer, and it is fascinating to read this early, apparently private document against the many personae and ironies of her later work. It is somewhat curious that this and other juvenilia, such as the “Letters to Felician,” have been translated into English while so much of her critical writing remains unavailable. Authors are not always well served by the publication of their immature writings, and in Bachmann’s case, critics seem eager to assimilate them into the unity of her work, sometimes naively. Adolescent writing is full of self-fashioning and failures of self-fashioning, particularly in diaries. The much more sophisticated treatment of identity, as well as the themes of these brief pages, in all of Bachmann’s mature work is of a different order entirely. If indeed she “just kept quiet about [her] poetry” in conversation with Hamesh, the encounter is necessarily limited. While Hamesh has his limitations as an interlocutor for her, even at this early age, his own words detail a fascinating, at times ambivalent transformation into a citizen of a new land: a role his “dear Inge” would never fully play. They would be interesting to read within, or alongside, a volume of similar letters to Europe from Israel.

Jessie Ferguson is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Stanford University. Her research focuses on essayism in twentieth-century fiction, and on fictionality and its discontents more broadly.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
Us by Michael Kimball. Tyrant Books, 180 pp., $14.95.

Published in Issue 27

Michael Kimball’s novella Us originally appeared in the U.K. under the title How Much of Us There Was. Tyrant Books has now brought it out in the United States, where Kimball was born and lives, and his website lists the widespread praise that the book has received. Here are but two of the many accolades: “disarmingly simple, gorgeously structured, and as achingly sad a book as I have ever read. I had to stop a couple of times. I really did” (Matthew Simmons, HTMLGIANT); “Michael Kimball’s Us is heartbreakingly lovely . . . the writing’s a pleasure, and sometimes you just need to read something with weight” (The Paris Review). But a closer examination of Us makes one wonder if the book deserves such rapturous praise.

At first, the book’s content seems likely to be stark and affecting. A man, eventually identified as Grandfather Oliver, is woken in the night by his wife’s shaking and “seizing up.” An ambulance takes Grandmother Oliver to the hospital where she lies for an unspecified time in a coma, until she slowly returns to consciousness. It takes her more time to get back the ability to talk and move, but she does, and is well enough to be discharged. She returns home under the care of her husband. This goes well enough for a while, but both are aware of the preciousness of the time left to them, as expressed in the chapter “How We Slowed Our Time Down”:

We found ways to make our days longer. We followed the sun around our house—from our bedroom and the bathroom in the morning, to the kitchen through noon, the living room through the afternoon, and the dining room for the evening.

At night, we turned all the lights in every room of our house on. We turned the lights on the front porch on. We turned the lights on the back porch and over the garage on too. We wanted to keep the darkness that surrounded our house and us as far away from us as we could.

Inevitably the wife deteriorates, and the husband calls the doctor, “but he said that he couldn’t help her anymore unless we took her back to the hospital. But I couldn’t take her back there or think of any other way to help her anymore.” The couple practice “home death,” and eventually take sleeping pills together. The wife dies; the husband lives on to see to her funeral and burial, and to grieve.

Though this is ostensibly a sad and simple story, two aspects of the writing blunt its emotional impact. Us is told in the voices of two main characters. The first is the husband/grandfather. The second is the unnamed grandson. (Oliver’s wife speaks a few times in his dreams.) This grandson pops up now and then to offer his opinions on death and describe how his grandfather exists after the death of the grandmother. He gives us a picture of what the grandfather does (such as trying to talk to spirits), and supplies certain information (only the necessary information) about family members. Notably, his speech is quite similar, in its orderly sentences, muted tones, and colorlessness, to his grandfather’s.

Here, for instance, is the grandson reflecting on his wife’s recovery from ear surgery:

She slept in our bed by herself and I stayed far enough away so that I would not bother her when she could sleep—even though she still couldn’t really hear—but near enough to her so that I could hear her if she woke or needed anything or needed me.

The grandson refers to relatives of his who had become seriously sick: “Nobody ever really got any better. Everybody died inside a hospital or came home from the hospital and died in their bed.” Compare that to Grandfather Oliver when he relates searching for his wife after her admittance: “Some of the people didn’t move or look at me when I looked inside their hospital room at them. They were dying in different ways and at different speeds.”

While numbness may be appropriate for Grandfather Oliver, who has been woken by his wife’s violent incident, after which his life is never the same, the grandson, who states he’s seen many relatives die “inside a hospital,” surely would feel loss in a personal manner and express it in his own terms. Yet instead of giving the grandson his own way of speaking, Kimball relies on a darker typeface to distinguish him from Oliver, and this is insufficient. The grandson’s language, like his grandfather’s, is filled with repeated words—death, dying, hospital, and so on—and his clauses rarely stray far from the simple. This choice on Kimball’s part denies a two-generation gap in sensibility, and it allows the repetitiveness to lead characters into babble. The effect is soporific. Sweeping generalizations of those who, of course, have to die in a hospital or in their bed go unchallenged and leave me wondering: Where does the grandson want or expect people to die, in the United States, in this current time?

The second aspect of Us that caught me by surprise is the very existence of the grandson. We are more than a third of the way through the novel when he shows up. This may have initially seemed a good idea, but it opens the book to structural issues. The first pages situate readers inside Oliver’s mind in a convincing manner. As the novella goes on we’re shown his thoughts and feelings, but no children or grandchildren are called, or call, and no nephews, nieces, sisters, or brothers visit. Not until Kimball inserts the grandchild into the book do we know Oliver has any family.

A straightforward narrative from the grandfather’s point of view provides a bleak picture, as we imagine him on his own, and it might make his tale match the Paris Review’s description of it as “heartbreakingly lovely.” But there is a family. Why don’t they appear in Oliver’s thoughts? If the purpose of their absence is to underscore how lonely Oliver feels, then what explains the medical personnel and the presence of other patients? The exclusion of every family member from Oliver’s consciousness requires an explanation that Kimball fails to provide.

But let’s consider the possibilities that Oliver is unable to think of family due to his misery, or that at some point in the past there’s been a severe rupture. In either scenario, beyond the medical community no one is there to help. But we know from the grandchild’s words that the family “stayed in the viewing room of the funeral home for all the viewing hours on all those viewing days.” From feeling sympathy for an elderly man without a family, I moved to disliking a selfish old guy who didn’t think much of being a father or maintaining strong ties with others. Oliver’s complete seclusion is a serious subject worth addressing—indicative of a monstrous ego or a harmful codependence—but it goes by without a word. (Exactly why Oliver can’t take his wife back to the hospital is similarly protected from comment or examination.)

Such self-centeredness touches on the above-mentioned problem Kimball has in making two rounded characters. Only Oliver has substance, yet what we learn from his grandson removes the sympathy felt for the grandfather. We hear a lot about Oliver’s love for his wife, and we get very little else. Apparently he can only keep living if his wife stays alive. It’s a common enough occurrence that the remaining spouse dies soon after the other spouse dies, especially if a broken heart is involved, but that isn’t a given in all circumstances. One would expect some hint of what the grandfather thought of his family, or of his attempt to talk about his loss.

Reviewers of Us find its appeal in its style, as best summed up by Time Out Chicago: “The sentences and even paragraphs simulate the stunned but dutiful response to the suffering of a loved one: short, raw and somewhat elliptical, wrapping themselves around the small tasks at hand and the larger questions constantly raised.” How the combination of illness, grief, and death is presented by a writer is one thing; the emotional trauma associated with those subjects is another, and they go unexplored in Us. The reviewers cited on Kimball’s webpage have ideas about what death looks like, and for them this book’s style is what captures their hearts—as they read of the death of a fictional character. We’re not so far removed from the scene of desperate 19th-century readers storming the docks for news of Little Nell, a death that would not have been so affecting—or, perhaps, manipulative—if written in a different style.

Much of what Kimball does is competent and well-crafted. His steady look at the death of a woman and all its consequences comes at a time when so many of us (at times with deep relief) sequester aged parents and other relatives in a home so their deaths can occur antiseptically. But Kimball’s performance is so smooth that it’s bland. Again we come back to the prose style that, as shown above, is almost always unadorned, lacking in resonance and replete with repetitiveness; there’s no flare of poetry, no untidy rhythm, and no excess. No matter the occasion, Oliver will always be inoffensive, never erupting with feelings or using an adjective for no good reason. He is controlled, and the result is gray, uninteresting prose.

In Us the theme of death is nicely wrapped up in a meat-and-potatoes kind of story, with the salt of irony left off the table. If the grandson had been left out of it we would have a bitter and haunting depiction of one man’s empty life, and drawn from that an appreciation of a society that has forgotten its elders and done away with the importance of family and friends, leaving our most vulnerable in the hands of white-coated medicos whose actions at best stall the inevitable trip to the beyond. Us is an earnest book that risks nothing, and bores through its aesthetic drabness. There’s not enough ambition behind it, and that’s something to grieve over.

Canadian writer Jeff Bursey has written reviews and articles for journals in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. His first book, Verbatim: A Novel, was published in October 2010 by Enfield & Wizenty.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India by Siddhartha Deb. Faber & Faber, 272 pp. $26.00.

Published in Issue 27

Since embracing economic reforms in the early 1990s, India has undergone swift and wrenching changes that are remaking the country from the ground up. As village and farmland give way to tech companies, call centers, factories, and malls, these new landscapes are increasingly peopled by new archetypal characters, much as the similarly radical transformation of the American West brought the world the cowboy.

In this sobering series of profiles laced with memoir and reportage, Siddhartha Deb examines several such figures, including the self-made man, the ubiquitous engineer, the rural farmer, the migrant laborer, and the urban working woman. Through the stories of several Indians from these groups, Deb, a novelist and native of India who teaches at New York City’s New School, reveals a composite portrait of a country in transition that is fascinating, troubling, and—to Western readers—unpleasantly familiar.

There is Chakravarthy Prasad (“Chak”), an engineer and onetime Illinois resident who is building a million-dollar house in a gated community that recalls the McMansions he saw in America. There is Arindam Chaudhuri, the founder of a dubious management school whose famous-for-being-famous image poorly withstands the scrutiny of investigative bloggers. There are middle-class strivers, an “army of Gatsbys” who have embraced the Bhagavad Gita’s warlike philosophy to justify their indifference to the poor—old Hindu wine of caste resignation in new bottles. (Similarly, Chak has adopted a guru who tells him the war on terror doesn’t matter, since one cannot change the world, only oneself.) There is Esther, a migrant waitress in the “unforgiving city” of Delhi who endures an epic daily commute; her boyfriend comes home from a stint in UAE and texts his lover there under Esther’s nose.

A striking barrenness marks many of these lives. Engineer S.S. Prasad claims never to have heard of global warming; he writes “nanopoems” in unintelligible zeroes and ones, then inscribes them invisibly on microchips at his workplace. Employees at tech firms like his are so engulfed by their jobs that happiness companies provide them with on-the-spot physical exercises and word games during the work day.

In some cases, the aridity is literal. Deb spotlights the disaster taking place in the lives of rural Indians in the form of dry wells, deadened soil, and lakes full of chemicals. Having switched from growing millet, many farmers are being driven out of business by the cost of sinking wells for thirstier market crops like soybeans. They are committing suicide by the hundreds of thousands, a profoundly underreported phenomenon.

Then, too, there is the plight of the migrant factory worker. By avoiding the conflation of poverty with squalor, Deb pinpoints what is terribly wrong in a steel-plant barracks full of men from all over India who share no common language, take turns sleeping in a single bed, and piss in a gutter running down the center of the room. They have no job security or upward mobility and few worker protections. More importantly, though, they keep no potted plants or touches of home. There are no women, no children playing, no colorful saris hanging out to dry. In the new India, these men and millions like them are adrift in the worst way: “[They were] cycling in and out of jobs and returning to their villages to recuperate from their hard labor and loneliness before setting out again when the money ran out.”

This is India lurching simultaneously into the Industrial and the Information ages, and even as it churns out new millionaires and creates a small middle class, the trip is destroying many lives. But land-use overhauls and migrations aside, the profoundest change in the subcontinent is voiced most clearly by Chak: India is shifting from a high-context to a low-context culture. In low-context America, people’s interactions focus on the reason that has brought them together, whereas in high-context India people have traditionally interacted in all kinds of ways, building strong social networks. But as villages are bulldozed by office parks, Deb neatly points out, “it would be possible, in some years—or maybe it was already possible—to put the Walkman on in India and ignore the maid coming in to do the cleaning.” Thus goes the loss, for worse or better, of a sense of place.

Signs of this loss are everywhere. The management school’s graduates become its faculty in a Mafia-like family, their fierce loyalty to their school’s culture having seemingly replaced older codes. Jabbar, a Bhopal activist, is a paragon of high-context India, his office crowded with working-class and poor people, yet he has gone almost unnoticed by people in power. His counterpart Sathyu has an internationally recognized organization with a website and visitors from Greenpeace and Bard College; he is building an eco-friendly medical clinic. Yet in his office, “the gas victims seemed to appear only on posters on the walls. . . . You could have efficiency or popular support, international alliances or deep local roots, it seemed, but not both.”

A high-context society, with its rich and varied social ties, can offer its poor a modicum of social protection; its erosion renders their futures, if possible, even more bleak. It is this process Deb captures in meeting after meeting. “In such a landscape, the poor—all those left behind by the creation of a low-context society—were like ghosts.”

The author seldom strikes a false note, with transitions among autobiography, journalism, and history handled deftly. He combines a measured voice and sometimes quiet wit with psychological insight, noting the empty platitudes an instructor feeds to a class of “dutiful” middle-class management students (“‘Leadership is about changing your colors like a chameleon to suit the situation’”) and interpreting the arrogance of a boss doing push-ups in front of his employees (“He was rewarded with embarrassed laughter, which is probably what he wanted”). His eye, too, is as good as a camera. “The bench was made of a plank balanced on bricks, perhaps one of the most common sights in India.”

Most importantly, Deb gets at the quality of the loss that India is undergoing, at what price is paid by a country that builds a hotel containing “‘a separate spa village complex’ . . . which meant that a fake village would replace the real village that had existed here.” The feeling recurs throughout the book in certain words: Incongruous. Fake identity. Displacement. Contradictions. Glittering surfaces. Deference, desire, and nervousness. ‘They don’t know who they are.’ Insecure and uprooted. Lost, unfit somehow. And he is quietly nostalgic for the India that is disappearing, as in the “rough utilitarianism” of a village not yet encroached upon by consumerism: “Here, there would be no escape from the self in objects or in technology . . . no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships.” If India continues to remake itself at its current pace, such places may find themselves becoming ersatz villages. Or ghost towns.

Jenny Blair is a writer and MD in Vermont. She co-edits the literary magazine Brink and is a two-time winner of the National Headliner Award.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (trans. Joanne Turnbull). NYRB Classics, 144 pp., $14.00.

Published in Issue 27

Only in 1976—after near fifty years of censure and oblivion—were the mislaid works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky recovered from amid the Soviet Archives. Scholar Vadim Perelmuter, chancing upon a brief epitaph in the writer Chengueli’s journals, went in search of them: “Today, December 28, 1950, Sigizmund Dominikovich Krzhizhanovsky died, a writer-visionary, an unsung genius. Of whom, in life, not one line was ever published.”

The first English-language publication of Krzhizhanovsky’s fiction would not follow until 2006, three quarters of a century after its conception. His extensive repertory consists principally of short stories, of which there are more than one hundred, as well as five novels. The first of these novels selected for English translation (by Joanne Turnbull) and publication this year through NYRB Classics is The Letter Killers Club.

Of course, all new light cast upon such unloved fictions is kind, soft, and humane. Consequently, certain reviews of Krzhizhanovsky’s work read like the gentle, penitent congratulations of friends for the one just come out a coma after a great many years. This is to say that joy and wonder are touched with regret, distraction, and even private indifference. The inconvenience of such late revelations is practical: how to consider a fiction in the context of a literary conference from which it has been precluded, all of its thoughts, its purposes, pertaining to a history to which it does not fairly belong. Appropriate respects are paid: comparisons to Borges, Beckett, Kafka; Krzhizhanovsky’s writings are, with so many compliments and decorations, wedged in upon their same, full shelf.

Yet, Krzhizhanovsky’s project is positively contemporary, and ingenious. His work expresses a deep and committed science, an “algebra” (as he describes his own project) of language. It is a sharply methodical literature, absorbed by both technical and figurative experiment. It should not be—yet again—shelved. Even dead sixty-two years, Krzhizhanovsky is, by all rights, a new writer and The Letter Killers Club new fiction.

In the novel, a “pure reader” is invited to sit in on the weekly meetings of a secret society of which all members are “ex-writers.” The club’s guiding principle is the renunciation and prohibition of the printed word, all following an incident years prior in which the club’s president was made to give away his library. During meetings, members are known only by nonsense syllables—Tyd, Rar, Das, etc. Every Saturday evening one member, or “conceiver,” takes his turn at telling a story and so demonstrating a “theme.” The novel records in quick and sharp-cut language the “minutes” of meetings attended by the reader. Members’ stories, irregular in both length and density (three pages or forty), make up the better part of the novel. They are systematically punctuated by discussion, dispute, brief and troubled reflection.

Krzhizhanovsky’s intention seems the demonstration of a very particular literary impossibility, which is best expressed in the story “The Bookmark” (gathered in the collection Memories of the Future, also published by NYRB Classics). Therein, the “theme catcher” remembers a “caricature” from an English magazine:

In the first picture, the girl (she’s carrying a basket) has caught up with the receding stagecoach; but to climb up onto the high footboard, she must put her basket down; having scrambled up onto the step, the girl turns around to collect her basket, but the stagecoach has already driven off; in the second picture, the poor girl jumps down, dashes back for her basket then runs after the lumbering stagecoach. She again reaches the step and this time settles her basket on it first; but while she is doing this, the stagecoach picks up speed, and the girl—in the third and last picture—exhausted and out of breath, plumps down in the middle of the road and bursts into bitter tears. . . . The literary stagecoach will not wait, which is why the poet with poetry in hand, given the conditions today, cannot possibly gain the elusive step: if the poet jumps into literature—then poetry is left behind, left out of literature; if poetry manages to attain the step, to attain an artistic level—then the poet, excluded and rejected, is left completely out.

So essential to the character of Krzhizhanovsky’s writing is his early and abiding commitment to music. A musician himself, Krzhizhanovsky identifies a conflict between literature and poetry, where poetry expresses the spontaneous and particular color of the letter, the word; and literature, the systems and structures that exploit words as strict units, in the service of “themes.” The distinction then is between the deliberate structures, which convey themes, and the words that such structures control and extinguish.

In Russian, as in English, Тема (theme) refers, independently, to a theory of musical analysis developed by Rudolph Reti during the early twentieth century. It is a melodic or harmonic sequence—the “material” which iterates throughout a work, giving structure, though undergoing modulations, variations, and evolutions. Reti writes specifically of “the thematic process.” He insists upon the importance of a deep and certain unity, “homogeneity in the inner essence,” that still allows for “variety in the outer appearance,” such that a composer “changes the surface but maintains the substance of his shapes.” Reti writes of thematic transformation, compression, dispersion, the “thinning” and ”filling” of themes, as well as “polythematism.”

Given his musical education, Krzhizhanovsky was almost certainly familiar, if only somewhat, with this very concentrated and particular notion of theme. Das’s story, the longest in The Letter Killers Club, demonstrates more explicitly the extent of Krzhizhanovsky’s interpretation.

A scientist concocts a species of parasitic microorganisms or “vibrophags,” which, infiltrating the brain, feed upon “vibrations, on the energy-producing discharge of nerve cells.” The same scientist then develops a strain of vibrophags that parasitizes “only the motor nerves, insinuating itself between will and muscle,” such that affected persons lose control over their own musculature.

Finally, this discovery is brought to bear, first on mental patients, and then upon the population at large. An engineer imagines a “single, central innervator” or “ex,” which might control and direct, collectively, a population’s muscles. Eventually, all persons, save a few politicians and scientists, are made into ‘ex-persons.’ Their bodies are controlled by “exes,” which compel them to work, as automatons, in factories. The ex has its “precise, musical score.” Ex-persons walk with “a jerky yet metronomic gait, rapping out exactly two steps per second.”

Despite their total, physical subjugation, the minds of such automatons remain intact. Yet, when two or three are finally emancipated from the ex, they fall to pieces, sobbing and convulsive. Just so, it is the Theme that instructs and compels words, that necessarily suppresses their specific, internal energies and momentums. They are put to work, made to serve a “single, central” thematic mechanism, its “score.”

Fev’s later story is of a peculiar vision in Venice, wherein the teller, seated on a restaurant terrace, imagines himself surrounded by all the thousands of persons to have died the same day:

. . . thousands upon thousands of agonies prevented me from seeing the day: the thousands of suns tumbled down into darkness; I saw a multitude of wax-like, sharp-featured faces with bulging white eyes; a sweetish decay threading my nostrils to my brain would not let me think or live. I remember it pierced me almost physically. I sat down at a little sidewalk table, the waiter brought me a place setting and at just that moment I saw thousands of them—lying on tables, mouths slack, slowly growing cold, helpless and frightening, banished from today to never. I did not eat my slowly cooling minestrone; my mind was feverishly trying to step out of that accursed black square. Then suddenly to the rescue came my theme. It flooded me all at once. In its grip, I remember, I rose mechanically quickly paid the . . .

Then, it is the same, notorious “theme” that flashes upon him, in order that he should forget his horror, only to rise “mechanically” from his chair. It is this briefest story that will decide the novel’s troubled end.

Krzhizhanovsky’s works are brave and imaginative experiments in structure, in the fictional potentialities of structure. There is in his writing the Dostoevskian tendency to put themes in the mouths of his characters, and of his characters’ characters, such that a finished fiction consists, essentially, of durations, proportions, and internal harmonies, of deep thematic and linguistic polyphonies.

As to the particular structure of The Letter Killers Club, it would seem driven by a dark and telling pleasure: the slow and meticulous cultivation of pure possibilities, raised only to die on the vine. Indeed, all stories told therein die quick and natural deaths precisely because not put down in words.

Christiane Craig is an American student of literature living in Paris. She has worked as a proofreader and assistant on several of The Cahier Series’projects.

REVIEWED:
Zona by Geoff Dyer. Pantheon, 228 pp., $24.00.

Published in Issue 27

Late last century, Geoff Dyer visited the Leptis Magna ruins in Libya and experienced the atheist’s equivalent of a revelation. In a Prospect essay from 2000 he describes walking through the Palaestra, “an expanse of grass and scattered columns,” where he was suddenly seized by

the sense—which I’ve had in only a few places in the world—of entering not so much a physical space as a force-field, where time stands its ground . . . [Leptis Magna] is not a place you enter, but the dream-space of the past: a zone.

Grass and scattered columns? Metaphysical insights and implications? A force-field beyond time? Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker—in which the unnamed title character leads two men, known only as “Writer” and “Professor,” into an abandoned disaster area called the Zone—will recognize the terrain immediately. When Dyer published an expanded version of the essay in his 2003 travel book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, he didn’t settle for mere allusion; in the book Leptis Magna is no longer a zone; it is now the Zone. Pivoting off the sight of the ruins, Dyer writes in Yoga,

If it weren’t for Stalker, I’m not sure I would ever have realized that the place I wanted to be—and the state I wanted to be in—was the Zone. Before I saw Stalker, I only had the need, the longing. In some sense I might have been to the Zone prior to seeing Stalker, but part of being in the Zone is realizing you’re in the Zone, and since I didn’t know there was such a thing as the Zone, I was not really in it.

Now we have Zona, Dyer’s book-length explication of the film that he has been mulling over in print for more than a decade. Like the film’s journeying hero, who devises his route by randomly tossing bolt nuts and trudging after them, he’s taken his time getting to the point. But the end result is revealing; despite its critical trappings, Zona reads like a personal history, even more so than Dyer’s many actual personal histories.

Of Dyer’s other books, Zona most resembles Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 paean to D.H. Lawrence. That too is a self-examination disguised as an exegesis—of “the writer who had made [Dyer] want to become a writer.” But he barely discusses his initial encounters with Lawrence’s writing or the reasons why Lawrence made him want to write in the first place. (For that you’ll have to read his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sons and Lovers, included in his 2011 omnibus Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.) Instead, Out of Sheer Rage is infamously a record of its own creation, a book about writing a book. At every point the action is occurring now, because every anecdote, digression, and close reading exists only to explain how the book came to be. Like everything that Dyer has written to this point, it feels relentlessly youthful, a celebration of the here and now and all the ways—sex, travel, drugs, books, nervous breakdowns—that we can fill it.

Same for the wonderful essay “Sacked,” also from Otherwise. Ostensibly a chronicle of Dyer’s first and only experience being fired, it’s actually a tour through his post-collegiate years. The job itself is a MacGuffin— it turns out that the initial ten pages of memoir are merely a setup for Dyer’s explanation of who he is, at the desk, at the very moment he writes. Looking at his diary from that time, Dyer boasts,

It meant nothing to me, that job. Compared to the books, the films, the parties, the drugs, the women, the sex, the laughing, the drinking, the clubs, and the friends, that job—and the career of which, had I been unlucky, it might have formed a part—was insignificant.

The soul of Zona, however, is defiantly in the past, amid that riotous procession of drugs and movies that “Sacked” commemorates. As such, this is the first of his books that that reads like the work of an older man. Which isn’t to say that the book is crotchety or nostalgic or even more stylistically reserved than usual—he still writes in the same charming, scholarly free-associative register, and his ability to synthesize arts criticism and memoir remains nonpareil. But Zona, though structured as a present-tense tour through Tarkovsky’s ruminative pseudo-sci-fi film, is really a reminiscence of Dyer’s past viewings. “This book is an account of watchings, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings,” he writes in an early footnote, “it is not the record of a dissection.” Out of Sheer Rage, by contrast, unspools into wilder, more unforeseen territory, but could nevertheless be aptly described as a dissection.

“The first few times I saw Stalker were during a phase in my life when I took LSD and magic mushrooms quite regularly,” Dyer explains, as if we couldn’t have guessed. This admission comes during his description of a scene midway through the film, when the three exhausted travelers lie down by a stream and fall asleep while discussing the role of art and artists in society. We then get an extended footnote about the role of age in determining one’s own personal canon of films. “I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their—what they consider to be the—greatest film after the age of thirty,” Dyer writes. “After fifty, impossible.” (Incidentally, he turns 54 this year.) By seeing Stalker when he did, his “capacity for wonder was . . . subtly enlarged and changed.”

Perfectly understandable. As he says, we’ve all had our own moments of “enlargement” thanks to art, moments that are by definition the product of our being a certain age. But then, Dyer, who (I say with great gratitude and respect) has written some of the most irrepressibly immature and self-obsessed books I’ve ever read—but whose saving grace has always been his self-awareness—goes full Dad:

It happens that the phase of my getting into serious cinema . . . overlapped with the intensely creative period of what might be called mainstream independent filmmaking, when American directors, having absorbed the influences of the European auteurs, carved out the freedom to realize their cinematic ambitions. I saw Taxi Driver when it was first released, and Apocalypse Now (and Jaws and Star Wars, which, together with the financial catastrophe of Heaven’s Gate, heralded the end of this phase).

I saw Stalker slightly later but I saw it when it came out, within a month of its release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak. I saw it, so to speak, live.

Beyond the first paragraph’s cursory, obvious treatment of contemporary film history, this passage is unique in Dyer’s writing for being so blatantly nostalgic. Even when he occasionally wrote with a blasé, seen-it-all-before weariness, it never before registered as so resigned and reflective. In “Editions of Contemporary Me,” an essay on jazz in Otherwise, he describes the “evangelical zeal” that he developed for house and techno music in the early 1990s, when he would have been in his early 30s. More recently, in 2006, Dyer rapturously described the artist Idris Khan’s composite photographs as “an out-of-body experience made flesh.” In both cases Dyer appears to have experienced the “wonder” that he values so strongly in Zona, despite his relatively advanced age. Perhaps music and visual art are different; tellingly, Zona’s age-specific criteria for valuing art only extends to movies, though this seems bizarre coming from a writer who has so seamlessly integrated photography, prose, poetry, music, and now film into his personal canon.

So, what could account for the sudden fuddy-duddification of Geoff Dyer, whose recent novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi contained extended odes to cocaine and anilingus? It’s worth considering his subject. Stalker is foremost a movie about time and epiphany. The Stalker himself (played by the hunched and looming Alexander Kaidanovsky) is a beaten man with a beleaguered family and a prison record. The Zone, assumed to be the byproduct of a meteorite or alien invasion, is heavily guarded by police, and the “stalkers” who guide people across its border are more like underground shamans than a discrete professional class. This particular monkish journeyer routinely risks his life to escort other lost souls because the Zone is the only place on earth he feels useful and fulfilled; outside he has only a harried and angry wife and a disabled daughter, who may or may not have inherited her handicap because of her father’s experience in the potentially radioactive Zone. The Stalker is a natural born seeker, but one with a rapidly declining faith in his only reliable source of transcendence.

When the Stalker returns from his trip with Writer and Professor, he is in despair, convinced that no one cares about the Zone as much as he does. He’s a proselytizer without an audience, which is nearly indistinguishable from a madman. But the movie’s final shot is haunting, miraculous even. Dyer calls it “one of the all-redeeming moments of any art form,” and I would add: Spoiler Alert. Stalker’s daughter, Monkey, alone in a room at home, directs her silent attention to a table, where three glasses begin to move as if by telepathy. Visually the shot is magnificent, simultaneously simple and unbelievable. But its thematic implications are even more inspiring: rather than a failure and the possible cause of his daughter’s handicap, the Stalker is revealed to be a true seer. The supernatural forces to which he’s devoted his scanty life do indeed exist, not in a quarantined no-man’s land but in his own home.

Though his life may be tragic, the Stalker’s faith is heroic—he’s right about the one thing in life that he cares most about, even if he likely won’t ever know it. Stalker is open-ended enough to function widely as a metaphor, but my preferred reading corresponds with Dyer’s: Stalker is an artist, sacrificing his own stability to guide strangers to profundity. By Dyer’s own admission he himself has passed the point of ever again finding a new Zone, a film that will move or unsettle him like Stalker did. So Zona is more soberly pensive than Out of Sheer Rage, and lacks its structure of ongoing inquiry. It is Dyer’s attempt to guide people down the path he took to get to an earlier revelation decades ago. It’s not his most inspired work, but it’s essential for anyone looking to discover the origins of his extraordinary voice and career.

John Lingan is a contributing editor to The Quarterly Conversation.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
Dogma by Lars Iyer. Melville House, 224 pp. $14.95.

Published in Issue 27

There’s a rarely acknowledged fallacy at the heart of both book reviewing and that loftier and more expansive discipline, literary criticism: the judgments that critics put forth are mostly subjective—albeit based on evidence, argument, and elucidation—and each critic works with his or her own rubric. Even so, we must acknowledge that whatever we hold as our traditional rules of book reviewing must at times be set aside when the work in question is sufficiently experimental or, simply, unusual.

Such is the case with the novels of Lars Iyer. A lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Iyer is the author of Spurious—which won The Guardian’s “Not the Booker Prize” last year—and, now, Dogma, a sequel to the previous work. Both books are novels in name only—bookstores require these convenient taxonomies. In reality Iyer has written scabrous philosophical comedies about two men—W., a moderately successful writer and intellectual, and his layabout failure of a friend, Lars Iyer. The plots follow their delirious, often drunken, conversations about life, religion, and the end of the world (which they believe is soon approaching). They’re like two very well read David Mamet characters, skydiving without parachutes and laughing all the way down.

The Iyer character narrates the books, and he actually says very little. Most of the text is W. incessantly hectoring his friend, telling him that he’s a wastrel, a drag on his own life and work, a ghastly mess, and various other forms of disappointment. Spurious began its life as a blog—something I only learned after reading—and the book does, in retrospect, have a bloggy feel: the chapters are short and jumpy; there’s almost no organizing principle; and W.’s pronouncements tend to have an off-the-top-of-my-head kind of spontaneity, albeit offered with humor and even brilliance. Here’s one of W.’s typical rants, from Spurious:

Which one of us is Kafka and which Brod?, W. muses. We’re both Brod, he says, and that’s the pity of it. Brods without Kafka, and what’s a Brod without a Kafka?

We are both Brod, W. says, and Brod for one another. When an ass looks into the gospels, no apostle looks back; when Brod looks into Kafka, it’s only Brod who looks back. I am his Brod, W. tells me, but he is my Brod, too.

I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it’s this we share in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy, wiping the sleep from our eyes and stretching.

This is how it goes for these “mystics of the idiotic.” W. is the pontificator; Iyer is his amanuensis, recording, listening, rarely chiming in, absorbing the fire hose of his ramblings. Kafka is their god, with various other European intellectuals of the modernist Jewish varietal occupying lesser places in the pantheon.

Little happens over the course of Spurious. There is no progression per se, except in Iyer’s flat, which is being consumed by mold. When Dogma opens, the mold, or “damp,” has receded, but now the apartment is infested with rats. One plague leaves, another enters.

Dogma has slightly more story than Spurious, though you might need a magnifying glass to find it. For part of the book, W. is on a lecture tour through the American South. The sense of an impending apocalypse is now more acutely felt, though occasionally the two men find solace in “Dogma,” a sort of religious code that may be intended to form the heart of this book but is quickly lost in the hurricane of chatter. As in Spurious, W. and Iyer wander (it’s not always clear where; there are no real “scenes”), exchange religious parables (Iyer is a Hindu; W. appears to be a lapsed Jew), and prattle on. Occasionally W. lets loose with some criticism of capitalism (“How long was it before market forces triumphed?, W. wonders. How long before competitiveness did away with friendship and community?”), but Iyer, the author, is not interested in building a sustained argument.

It is here that Dogma forces me to question the utility of my traditional reviewer’s rubric. Because anyone reading Iyer’s work and expecting pathos or unity of time, structure, and narrative—any of those pesky shibboleths of the novel—will be disappointed. On the other hand, these books, if considered under the broader banner of “fictions,” are genial entertainments—like encountering your favorite college professor slumped over a bar, desperate for a willing listener.

A professor himself, Iyer is an omnivorous consumer of the humanities. There doesn’t seem to be a European artist or intellectual who he hasn’t chewed over. And his related ability to invoke anyone from Wittgenstein to the Austrian poet George Trakl is a crowd-pleaser for those readers who appreciate writers who are voracious in their appetites. Moreover, his characters’ overriding sense that we are living in some sort of pre-apocalyptic time—fated to be undone by climate change, civilizational decay, or our own incipient madness—seems to reflect something authentic about our own unstable reality. When these thoughts are communicated in darkly, desperately humorous ramblings, there is then a lot to enjoy, if not much to move you.

Well steeped in the Western canon, Spurious and Dogma at times reminded me of the experimental novels of David Markson. While there isn’t any of Markson’s encyclopedic sensibility, the books share a tendency to accrete information, often of a very dark bent, and they are attuned to mortality’s quickening approach. Like Markson, Iyer repeats himself and continually returns to the same things, seeking perhaps to create an impression of something, rather than to communicate the thing itself.

And yet, that leaves us sifting through the pile in hopes of finding something to hold onto. I appreciate Iyer’s references; his worshipful excitement is infectious; and there’s a welcome way in which these books feel quite up-to-date, such as a funny anecdote when W. becomes addicted to the game Civilization 4, destroying one newly purchased, unopened copy before he can relapse. Iyer has distinguished himself as a writer of great comic ability, and I would certainly snap up anything else he might write to see how he deploys this blend of erudition and wit.

But in the end, it’s hard to divorce oneself from the notion that these books are insubstantial (however deliberately), and that we enjoy the mind behind them more than the books it produced. Spurious and Dogma ask us to forgo the pleasures of story without leaving us much to feast on in its stead. Pursuing one of the book’s threads—the narrator’s infested apartment, W.’s academic life, their road trip through the U.S.—with even half-hearted attention would have left a far more solid foundation on which Iyer could present his monologues. The voice, after all, requires a body.

One can still find tantalizing fragments of satire here—for example, W.’s “college is going to specialize in sport instead” of academics—but this kind of imaginative brio is mostly left in reserve. Spurious and Dogma also lack the formal innovation of Markson’s work while failing to stake out new ground in the admittedly difficult terrain of experimental fiction. I had fun reading these books, but they left me little to savor or to long remember. Unfortunately, that makes them more Brod than Kafka.

Jacob Silverman is a contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and many other publications.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
Autoportrait by Edouard Levé (trans. Lorin Stein). Dalkey Archive Press, 120pp, $12.95.

Published in Issue 27

It is inevitable that we spend the majority of our time thinking about ourselves, but what kinds of thoughts do we think? Our tendency, I would argue, is for the repetitive and the haphazard; we reflect on those aspects of ourselves that come to mind most commonly—the foods we like to eat, what we think of the daily commute, how we would prefer to make love—and we reflect on those things that occasion forces us to—the trials and strong experiences that we cannot help but break apart within the crucible of our minds. This way of considering self is not limited to our real lives. In the realm of the imagination, that of great works of literature, the protagonists’ thoughts tend to stick to a few worn paths, leaving entire modes of experience that are never described. We know what Leopold Bloom thinks when on the toilet, but what of those many parts of life that he never visits in his one Dublin day? Of those things, which make up the great majority of Bloom’s life, Ulysses is silent.

Autoportrait by Edouard Levé is notable for attempting to say all the things about a person that are not usually said. The book is simply a series of declarative sentences that lasts for 117 pages. The sentences are all ostensibly about Levé himself; they lack any discernable order and they are contained within one book-length paragraph. They seem to include every genre of thing that could be said about a person, ranging from the factual (“I have never filed a complaint with the police.”) to the oddly pointless (“I do not foresee making love with an animal.”) to the philosophical (“I wonder whether the landscape is shaped by the road, or the road by the landscape.”) to the bizarre (“On the Internet I become telepathic.”) to the psychoanalytic (“Whether it’s because I was tired of looking at them, or for lack of space, I felt a great relief when I burned my paintings.”) to the comic and confessional: “On the street I checked my watch while I was holding a can of Coke in my left hand, I poured part of it down my pants, by chance nobody saw, I have told no one.” Throughout, Levé touches on more topics than we are conditioned to expect from a single book: childhood, politics, sex, art, death, depression, fears, hopes, reading, walking, nature, sartorial preferences, Spanish cafes, scruples about talking too much, rubber boots, the effect of a cane on one’s appearance, and the fear that one’s vocabulary is shrinking are just a small number of the topics included. In fact, the book’s exceptionally mercurial demeanor means that with nearly every sentence Autoportrait shifts to a new facet of life.

To structure a book without structure is, of course, to invite accusations of bad faith. But the totality of Levé’s oeuvre convinces that his use of chaos is not out of laziness or obstinacy but is rather an expression of some deeper logic. Levé was both a writer and a photographer, and all of his written and photographic books are made in the way that Autoportrait is made: without form, in rigorous adherence to conceits that Levé attempts to exhaust. Thus his previously translated work, Suicide, a book about a man’s suicide, is written in what he calls a “stochastic” order, “like picking marbles out of a bag.” Narrated by a friend of the suicide, the book seems to simply exhaust all that the narrator knows of his deceased chum. Autoportrait similarly exhausts all that Levé can say about himself, or, at least, all that he can say for the purposes of this self-portrait.

As with Suicide, the prose in Autoportrait is so clean and generally immaculate that when Levé does misplace a word, it jars. (As Jan Steyn did with Suicide, here translator Loren Stein has done Levé a true service; one wonders which homophone for Steyn/Stein will bring Levé’s third book into English.) The book gives the pleasure of aphorism, not so much for the content (though often that is the case as well) as for the rigid way the sentences snap together, leaving behind a sensation of inevitability. Stein is to be given great credit for economical phrasings that are pulled satisfyingly taut by the weight of their last word. Levé’s musings have an odd power to inspire self-examination; sentences like “I remember what people tell me better than what I said” are powerful invitations to consider one’s own practices. Throughout, the book conveys a pleasing air of levity and whimsicality, perhaps simply for the forthrightness of the prose, no matter whether it discusses trivial traits or life-and-death questions.

As good as the sentences are individually, how do they fit together? Pointillism is a word frequently associated with Levé’s prose (a characterization encouraged by the two covers of his English-language translations, both taken from Levé’s illustrations of himself). It’s not a bad word to use with his work. Each sentence feels like its own little dab of semantics, independent of the surrounding sentences though also related in some murky way that should be grasped if we could get far enough away from the text. This sense solid overall construction is abetted by the titles of Levé’s four prose works, which are each single, solid words that imply some object of study that they amount to: “self-portrait,” “suicide,” “works,” and “newspaper.” At very rare times the text even seems to indicate something about itself: “I am making an effort to specialize in me,” Levé tells us out of nowhere on page 81. At other times the text agglutinates quite magnificently, as in this stretch:

I will never know how many books I have read. Raymond Roussel, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Antonio Tabucchi, André Breton, Oliver Cadiot, Jorge Luis Borges, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Ghérasim Luca, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Joe Brainard, Roberto Juarroz, Guy Debord, Fernando Pessoa, Jack Kerouac, La Rouchefoucauld, Baltasar Gracian, Roland Barthes, Walt Whitman, Nathalie Quintane, the Bible, and Bret Easton Ellis all matter to me. I have read less of the Bible than of Marcel Proust. I prefer Nathalie Quintane to Baltasar. Guy Debord matters more to me than Roland Barthes. Roberto Juarroz makes me laugh more than Andy Warhol. Jack Keuroac makes me want to live more than Charles Baudelaire. La Rochefoucauld depresses me less than Bret Easton Ellis. Olivier Cadiot cheers me up more than André Breton. Joe Brainard is less affirmative than Walt Whitman. Raymond Roussel surprises me more than Baltasar Gracian, but Baltasar Gracian makes me more intelligent. Gertrude Stein writes texts more nonsensical than those of Jorge Luis Borges. I read Bret Easton Ellis more easily on the train than Raymond Roussel. I know Jacques Roubaud less well than Georges Perec. Ghérasim Luca is the most full of despair. I don’t see the connection between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Antonio Tabucchi. When I make lists of names, I dread the ones I forget.

I like how these sentences glow with the heat of thought, as though Levé wrote them all down in a fit. They stand out as a little tangle of thought, a sudden desire to pin down something that remains at arm’s length. Although this list tells us surprisingly little that we can grab on to as fact, what it most connotes is a sensation that Levé has both barely begun to exhaust a subject and said all that he wants to say about it. It is a sensation felt throughout Autoportrait. Levé’s portrait ultimately points us not to him as a person so much as the limits of what a portrait can express, and why we have generally chosen paint ourselves into certain cherished forms.

By breaking out of these forms and remaining silent on his choice to do so, Levé forces us to take on the role of ethnologist. This is where Autoportrait most strongly resembles graphic art. All points of entry to the text are equally valid; the text feels that it is happening all at the same time, instead of passing through time as the book is read from front to back. It doesn’t recruit a reader’s intellect in the sense of most challenging literature—which requires readers to fill out subtleties of plot, social interaction, and occasionally grammar—it asks the reader to say what is beneath the slick surface of each sentence.

Such a form will likely make many readers uncomfortable, as it entirely ignores those requirements asked of long works of prose. Its apparent simplicity also invites the accusation that anyone could make a similar book. To these remarks I have only one good response: the book proved far more engrossing than most books I have read this year, and it has given rise to far more thought and discussion. As a writer and an artist Levé constantly upended expectations with the simplest of gestures, as he has done here. Autoportrait is another small gem from a writer of great talent and originality.

Scott Esposito edits The Quarterly Conversation.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade (trans. Alejandro de Acosta, Joshua Beckman). Wave Books. 96 pp., $16.00.

Published in Issue 27

Susan Sontag, in her essay on Walter Benjamin and the melancholic temperament, “Under the Sign of Saturn,” considers Benjamin’s love of small things and the poetics of the miniature: “To miniaturize means to make useless,” she writes. “For what is so grotesquely reduced is, in a sense, liberated from its meaning—its tininess being the outstanding thing about it.” The miniature turns the user or observer back into a child (“love of the small is a child’s emotion”), whose imagination is unencumbered by the use value of things.

Wave Books’s recent publication of Ecuadorean poet Jorge Carrera Andrade’s 1940 Micrograms, poems one could call miniatures—most are about three or four lines long—swathes the poems in between layers of critical apparatus that are very useful, to the extent that one begins to suspect a self-consciousness about the poems’ brevity that calls to mind Sontag’s thesis. For not only are the poems tiny, but there are only thirty-one of them, altogether about 120 lines of poetry—hardly enough, one might think, to constitute a book. And yet the manner in which this critical apparatus—which includes a translator’s introduction, Andrade’s introduction sketching out a mini-history of the microgram, a second Andrade introduction, and, following the poems, a section of Andrade’s translations of Japanese haiku, and a translator’s note on that—takes on a status equal to the poems themselves productively questions the autonomy of the poem as object, and makes the tacit argument that poems are only one element of a complex organism of thinking, research, reading, and being in the world. The flowers, let’s say, of a flowering tree, of which are equally significant the roots, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves. Andrade’s original publication included four of these six elements; the translators, Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta, added the two translators’ notes, thus building upon a presentation of the poems that is well-cued to our zeitgeist, in which interest in both explorations along the critical-poetical seam and reflections on translation is high.

The expository gates through which the poem-seeking reader must first pass through the book only make the arrival in the inner chamber that much sweeter, and one is rewarded with the likes of:

WHAT THE SNAIL IS

Snail:
tiny measuring tape
with which God measures the field.

Sontag’s miniature is here accorded a use value—of a sort; part of the pleasure of this poem, and of many in the book, is the contradiction between the absurd scale and the serious intent accorded the entity attempting to function within its parameters.

But before diving into the poems, a bit more about the introductions, and thus the “micrograms.” What is a microgram, anyway, which looks so suspiciously like a haiku? Andrade, who lived the cosmopolitan life of the South American poet, full of diplomatic postings as far-flung as China, makes explicit that the microgram is only the most recent iteration of a long tradition of miniature poems, which he traces through Spain, Latin America, Japan, and France. He in fact has only given it a new nomenclature: “And the microgram, that tiny lyrical composition whose name only I have invented . . .” replacing the designations “epigram,” “song,” “saeta,” “haiku,” “proverb,” “poetic riddle,” and the like. Indeed, the word microgram is appealing, with its pseudoscientific character and its nod to the microscopic, implying a degree of looking at the world that will reveal qualities inaccessible to the naked eye. The scientific shading accords with the fact that Andrade is conscious of his position along the transitional process of the industrial and technological revolutions, and he acknowledges that his instrumentalization of little natural creatures has a trace of the elegiac about it:

The hummingbird, the snail, the macaw, the crickets, are all concluding their festival of color and sound before the advance of the motor, that hurried heart of the twentieth century. But this does not signal the death of the microgram. It will be reborn, rather, adorned with an urban character. The hero will no longer be the oyster or the swallow, but any of those mechanical creations that are transforming our time into an Age of Steel.

This position, between the old world of “nature” and the new world of industrial-technological “culture,” is explored in the poems via the tensions and resolutions between the two. The relentless pressure of the human to wring a use value out of every living thing is everywhere at play, culminating in a discord between an Enlightenment ideal of total legibility and the stubborn persistence of the non-human to remain illegibly itself. The snail is pressed into a service it can only render in its own manner—which is of course to render no real service at all—and in the process the snail’s real use value is erased, the snail is mechanized. Legibility is the most consistent metaphorical application to the microgram’s creatures in this deeply metaphorical set of poems. For example:

TYPEWRITING

Late Night Toad: your little
typings strike
the moon’s blank page.

Again and again in the poems creatures are writing, typing, spelling, keeping manuscripts (that’s a clam), deciphering. In this, of course, they constitute proxies for the writer himself, and this act of anthropomorphism circles back in on itself, displaying the will both to empathize and to conquer, a paradox of which Andrade is well aware. The references to God, meanwhile, expand the number of planes on which these ludic engagements with scale can play out, but they also leaven the relationship of human to animal with the inference that the human is subordinated to a higher power—it sets in motion a play of hierarchy whose elements are hardly stable. The fact that the “Late Night Toad”-proxy’s “typings” (its croaks, presumably) strike a moon that remains blank further empties the act of writing of its use value for all but the futile beauty of it. In

ALPHABET

Birds are
God’s handwriting.

even God is using living creatures to achieve legibility, although what God writes remains indecipherable for the human. Or is what God has to “say” exactly that—that birds exist, and that their existence is an expression of something that is and must remain unreadable, irreducible to a “meaning”? Sometimes the refusal to yield use on the part of the animal is pronounced:

TORTOISE

The turtle in its yellow case
is the clock of the earth
stopped centuries ago.

Dented now it hides
among the tiny stones of time
in waters’ blue cover.

The human imagination succeeds—in imagining the tortoise as a clock—where it must also fail: the clock stopped centuries ago.

It is hard to agree with Andrade that the microgram may in the future (which may well, of course, mean now) be reborn with an urban character, for there is little that is miniature about the urban, and hardly any aspect of the urban is free of use value, however much a flâneur may fantasize experiencing the city in total freedom from its exchanges. Walter Benjamin’s love of the miniature—as well as his sustained engagement with the urban—expressed itself in his writing as an affinity for both the fragment and the short form, but the microgram’s tininess is far more radical. And it is also highly imagistic; it is hard to imagine urban images—the sheer scale of, say, a factory or the Empire State Building—contained imaginatively within the spatial possibilities it offers. Haiku was conceived as a mode to engage with the natural world, and particularly the seasons. Skyscrapers don’t lose their windows in autumn; streetlamps don’t put out flowers in spring. Nature exists in the city only in carefully controlled doses, whereas culture is hypertrophied, so that the balance between them that Andrade explores in his micrograms could easily be lost were the “heroes” indeed the “mechanical creations” he figures. This tinge of nostalgia for an imagined future that never came into being further lends the book its high charm.

Andrade’s micrograms come to us across gulfs of time and space and ask questions about our own historical moment—after seventy years of long poems, trailing in the wake of The Cantos and the like, what kind of ground can the tiny stake out for itself? Does The Cantos have any more use value than “WHAT THE SNAIL IS”? What does tininess actually signify, and on whose scales? Wave Books and the translators are to be applauded for undertaking this refreshing reclamation project, which leads to reflections that more than trump its modest size.

Donna Stonecipher is the author of three books of poetry, most recently The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press, 2008). She lives in Berlin and translates from German and French.

Published in Issue 27

REVIEWED:
The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems by Eric Ormsby. Carcanet. 118 pp., $19.95.

Published in Issue 27

Repeat after me:

I wanted to go down to where the roots begin,
To find words nested in their almond skin,
The seed-curls of their birth, their sprigs of origin.

The iambs beat like a healthy heart. The buzz of r‘s on the tongue is pure pleasure, as is the echo of Yeats. Next stanza:

At night the dead set words upon my tongue,
Drew back their coverings, laid bare the long
Sheaths of their roots where the earth still clung.

Words are fecund, passed along by the past, by forebears poetic and otherwise. In tongue/long/clung we hear the solemn tolling of ancestors. Like plants, like teeth, words have roots, are rooted. Now pay attention:

I wanted to draw their words from the mouths of the dead,
I wanted to strip the coins from their heavy eyes,
I wanted the rosy breath to gladden their skins.

Poetry is acquiescent ventriloquism, borrowed voices. The words are already there. We need only listen to reanimate them, to raise the dead. And now the concluding lines:

All night the dead remembered their origins,
All night they nested in the curve of my eyes,
And I tasted the savour of their seed-bed.

The tongue, lips and palate savor words. Reading a poem is akin to eating and singing, urges that sustain us while giving pleasure. Something about the best poetry is primally human. Eric Ormsby titles his poem “Origins” and sets it like an epigraph, italicized, at the front of The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems, suggesting a disclaimer for what follows: “My poems are written to give pleasure,” he might be saying. “No trespassing for the tin-eared and ahedonic. ”In the essay “Poetry as Isotope: The Hidden Life of Words” (Facsimiles of Time, 2001), Ormsby makes clear his poetic assumptions:

In poetry the immediate pleasure is physical. Recurrence, repetition, pattern, design, account for much of the pleasure we receive from poetry; these returning patterns correspond to something in ourselves, to something in nature. They correspond to the rhythm of things. They echo the beat of our hearts, the pulse in our throats, the cadence of our breath. They reflect larger sequences of recurrence: the alternations of night and day, the succession of the seasons, the elemental speech of natural processes; the voices of rivers or of oceans; the various dialects of the winds; the articulated and recurrent cries of birds.

Such talk is heretical in today’s culture of colloquial poetry flatter than good prose. Ormsby is a multilingual voluptuary of sound. Born in Georgia in 1941 and raised in Florida, his career has been unusually scholarly and cosmopolitan, qualities that distinguish his verse yet never make it stuffy. He lived for decades in Montreal, serving as director of University Libraries and professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. Now he is professor and chief librarian at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. His previous books include Theodicy in Islamic Thought and Moses Maimonides and His Time, and Ormsby has earned a reputation as a discerning critic and reviewer in England and North America. He shares the bookish bent of those other librarian-poets, Borges and Larkin.

The Baboons of Hada is a severe winnowing of Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems, published in 2007 by Biblioasis of Canada. At almost 300 pages, the earlier volume contains Ormsby’s previous five collections together with new and uncollected poems. It’s the volume to acquire if you find Ormsby’s work to your liking. Unusually, none of his poems is without merit, though some shine more brightly than others. His new book contains a stingy 68 poems in 118 pages, arranged in four sections without regard for chronology. It’s more a representative core sample than a career-documenting cornucopia.

Ormsby is a poet of celebration. He revels in the order and design of creation. He’s unapologetic about his abject love of the beautiful. In “Microcosm” he sounds like a fractal-minded Blake: “The smallest beings harbor a universe / Of telescoped similitudes.” But he’s neither nature mystic nor heir to the Transcendentalists, celebrating and singing himself while ostensibly celebrating Nature. Many of his poems, like Marianne Moore’s (perhaps the poet he most resembles, with a dash of Wallace Stevens), are devoted to animals, usually species of elegant design or capable of elegant creation—starfish, spiders, flamingos and anhinga. To fauna he adds flora, often the humble, homely sort still beautiful in design—milkweed, mullein, lichens and skunk cabbage. His sonnet to the last-named flower concludes with these lines:

It always seems so squat, dumpy and rank,
A noxious efflorescence of the swamp,
Until I got down low and looked at it.

Now I search out its blunt totemic shape
And bow when I see its outer stalks
Drawn aside, like the frilly curtains of the ark,
For the foul magenta of its gorgeous heart.

Ormsby is a poet of second and third looks, both curious and reverent, who bows before the world’s bounty to see it more closely and to pay his respects. His work is neither confessional nor rancorously political—the default modes of much contemporary verse. Even his overtly autobiographical poems, usually devoted to his Southern childhood, are never preciously self-regarding, building up to the portentous revelation so dear to the hearts of small poets. A poem titled “Childhood Home” would normally be cause for running away in dread. Ormsby turns it into a sad, clear-eyed meditation on memory and its duplicitous seductions:

Somehow I had assumed
That the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself,
And that what we had once possessed remained our possession
Forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
Hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
Did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
Ageing mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
Our remembrance.

Sometimes I fancy that poets and all writers can be distinguished as writing either for children or adults, and either as children or adults. So many are among the former. Their assumptions about the world are one-dimensional and without nuance. Of course, even a mature-minded poet can, on occasion, slip into childishness.

Ormsby has been dismissed by some critics as a finicky collector of bric-a-brac, a fuddy-duddy of pretty effects. Such assessments reflect a childish earnestness. In a review of Marianne Moore’s letters, Ormsby once referred to that great poet, so often patronized as a quaintly cute old lady, as “a tenacious, indeed obsessive writer who could be as cruel in her curiosity as she was exquisite in her perceptions.” In Ormsby we see a similar melding of the scientist’s ruthless eye and the singer’s sensitive tongue.

Patrick Kurp is a writer living in Houston, Texas, and the author of the literary blog Anecdotal Evidence.

Published in Issue 27