Category: Book Features

Dogwalker

By Arthur Bradford

Knopf, 144 pp., $20

Arthur Bradford’s story “Catface” first appeared in
Cornell University’s journal Epoch in the spring of 1996. Bradford, who
was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University at the time, gained something of
an underground following soon afterward.

“Catface” is a mesmeric first-person narrative that
begins, “The disability payments were being cut down since, according to
their doctor, I was getting better.” Upon reading that first line, you
know that here is a humorous voice from left field, perfect for the times, and
the story is sure to be a sort of paean to slackerdom and modern neuroses. It
is indeed that and more. “Catface” won an O. Henry Award in 1996,
and now, five years after its initial publication, it joins 11 other stories
by Arthur Bradford in his long-awaited debut collection, Dogwalker.

The hilarious “Catface,” which opens the collection, is
a tour de force work of fiction on the brink of absurdism. The nameless,
passive narrator wanders through a seemingly timeless world where
responsibility has faded or been worn away, the beleaguered are doomed to
always cross paths with the merely hapless, and the only way to come out of it
all still intact is to remain serenely dumbfounded and imperturbably cool. The
narrator is just that as he, having been out of work for months, goes about
the task of securing a roommate to split the cost of his studio apartment. The
first is Thurber, a kleptomaniac and destroyer of potted plants who snores
loudly. Asked to find another place to live, Thurber packs up his things (and
some of the narrator’s) and leaves amiably enough. The second seems to be
unaware that she is a hooker, and the third stays for only three days — let’s
just say his past catches up with him. And then comes Jimmy. He sets up a tent
as his room and arranges for Thurber, who’s been coming back around, to get
beaten up. This incident sets off a sequence of mishaps, odd voodoolike
ceremonies, and fateful chance meetings with the grotesquely lovable that make
the story one of the funniest and most imaginative to appear in the Nineties.
As for the rest of the stories in Dogwalker, some deliver on the
promise of “Catface” while others are pleasing but not of the same
you’ve-got-to-read-this caliber. Particularly fun are “Bill McQuill”
and “Dogs.”

Bradford seems to have simultaneously lucked onto the Raymond
Carver and Franz Kafka crowd. With his deliberately simple, charmed prose (a
la Carver) and the surreal elements that make up his stories (a la Kafka), he
walks what many consider to be new fictional ground. But such reactions are a
bit myopic. Like the Jews of antiquity, today’s readers of literary fiction
seem to always be desperately searching for a savior, a jinni of the written
word, a reincarnated hero of the past: Though Bradford does not necessarily
call either to mind, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor are the two old
heroes most popular in the South. (Very prevalent these days are harebrained
reviews touting some mediocre, excruciatingly melodramatic author as a new
version of one or a metaphysically colluded symbiosis of both of those
arguably irreplaceable writers.)

Bradford is very good and very funny, but he is most definitely
not, as David Sedaris has opined, “the most outlandish and energetic
writer” (Thomas Pynchon is still and will probably always be the reigning
champ of madness and absolute cerebral muscle).

So by all means rush out and buy Dogwalker but don’t do it
expecting to save your reader’s soul. Do it because it’s great fun. You can be
sure of this. Do it because you love Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” and
William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man and Kafka’s “A Hunger
Artist” and William Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and Laurence Sterne’s The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the
Monkey House” and Donald Barthelme’s “Indian Uprising.” What’s
that? You haven’t read them all? Well, that’s understandable. Those are just
some of the former saviors of fiction. — Jeremy Spencer

All For Love

By Ved Mehta

Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 345 pp., $24.95

Somewhere inside two years of psychotherapy followed by two years
of psychoanalysis Ved Mehta said to his Park Avenue doctor, “You can’t
imagine the amount of reading and writing I have to get through in a
day.”

He was right. His doctor couldn’t imagine it, because, strictly
speaking, Mehta neither reads nor writes. He’s normally read to by and
dictates to an amanuensis (Mehta’s word of choice) because he’s blind and has
been since meningitis knocked out his eyesight, age 4, in his native India.
But he doesn’t want you to think of him as blind, doesn’t want to think of
himself as blind, and in All For Love, book nine in Mehta’s continuing
series of autobiographical writings, “Continents of Exile,” didn’t
want his girlfriends thinking so either. In fact, he made it a precondition of
loving them that they not think so at all. What kind of woman would date a
man, live with a man, get pregnant by him, engaged to him, and not once
mention the fact the man couldn’t see? Four kinds and in this order, according
to the four women described in this book: a prima ballerina, a jobless
neurotic, a total ingrate, and a borderline psychotic.

Girlfriend #1, the ballerina, 1962: Gigi dances for the
Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company, things between her and Mehta are going
great guns. Then Gigi brings up ex-boyfriend David in Switzerland, then Mehta
goes impotent, then Gigi tells Mehta, “I am utterly fascinated by you. My
feelings for you are profound.” Then David suddenly shows up from
Switzerland, Gigi agrees to marry him, and Gigi calls Mehta at work at The
New Yorker to break the bad news. Mehta goes to “the loo” and
sits in a stall. Then he worries that his amanuensis is wondering where he is.
Then he wonders if this same amanuensis knows she’s just witnessed one of the
“worst shocks” he’s ever received. In 1994 Mehta calls Gigi:
“There was never a chance that things could have worked out with us, was
there?” Gigi, the soul of tact: “No, there was never any
chance.”

Girlfriend #2, the neurotic, 1963: Mehta runs into unemployed
Vanessa, from his Oxford days, on the street in New York. Immediate sexual
fireworks, if and when she isn’t jumping out of bed in the middle of the night
to walk a dog, which apparently needs a lot of walking. Already sounds fishy,
but it gets worse. While Mehta is in London, Vanessa’s hooking up with a
waiter in Little Italy. Mehta’s “irritated.” Vanessa and the waiter
marry, Vanessa goes into “deep” psychoanalysis (to deal with
“her feelings of pain and chaos”). Then Vanessa comes into a
“substantial” inheritance. Then Vanessa takes up with a Hindu guru.
In a letter to Mehta in 1999 Vanessa finally described to him “the dog-
sitting situation.” Conclusion: Although Mehta and Vanessa had
“shared a bed,” at a “deeper level” he “had not known
her at all.”

Girlfriend #3, the ingrate, 1966: Lola is Mehta’s perfect
amanuensis: quick-thinking, hard-working, half-Punjabi (Mehta is full
Punjabi), and, what’s more, they share the same birthday! They travel India
for a book Mehta is researching, get it on immediately. Mehta returns to New
York, Lola has an awful lot of trouble joining him. Lola hooks up with a
record-store clerk named Gus, Lola gets pregnant by Gus, Lola gets an
abortion, Lola moves to New York, Lola sets up house with Mehta, Lola leaves
New York to join Gus in London (to get him “out of [her] system”;
Mehta pays for the trip). Then Mehta joins Lola in London, Mehta takes Lola to
Spain, Lola gets pregnant by Mehta, Lola gets another abortion, the second in
10 months, etcetera and whatever. Lola ends up in New Delhi as head of a
string of shops called the Denim Depot, but the latest Mehta heard Lola has
taken up with a “holy woman.” As for Gus? He dead.

Girlfriend #4, the borderline psychotic, 1968: Mehta, now 35,
falls for Kilty (for Katherine): 24, a native New Yorker, a poet, a grad
student in English at Yale, and, you guessed it, a walking basket case. Poor
Mehta. When Kilty isn’t babytalking, isn’t adoring Mehta, isn’t hating Mehta,
she’s complaining of “demons,” getting pregnant by her (ex-
?)boyfriend Coby (a case and a half himself), having a D&C, and seeing a
shrink in Scarsdale. Poor shrink. After six months, he pronounces Kilty
“unanalyzable.” You will, after a few pages of Kilty, have already
pronounced her unbearable. The latest update: No news is good news.

Which brings us back to the Park Avenue doctor above, Mehta’s own
shrink, who forces the author, over the course of some 400 hours of therapy
whittled down to some 70 pages of transcripted sessions at the close of All
For Love — sessions recalled word-for-word by Mehta? recorded word-for-
word by his trusty amanuensis? did the good doctor know his own remarks were
being recorded? how did this make the good doctor feel? — to maybe give some
thought to certain features of Mehta’s psyche it doesn’t take an analyst to
uncover: that Mehta is a “Milquetoast” and “masochist” and
clearly caught up in the classic Oedipus complex. Other conclusions I’ll leave
in the hands of a professional because only a professional could come up with
them, the chief being that Mehta is unknowingly “projecting” the
doctor into the role of his “fifth lover.” The clue: The author and
analyst used the same laundry! “It’s going to sound silly to you,”
Dr. Bak tells his uncomprehending analysand, “but … unconsciously you
wanted your underpants to be washed with my underpants.”

Yeah, it sounds silly because it is silly, but Mehta’s life since
sounds nifty: a happy marriage and two children. Check future installments of
“Continents of Exile,” as written by (dictated by) Ved Mehta, on the
off-chance more comes out in the wash. — Leonard Gill

Mosquito

A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe

By Andrew Spielman and

Michael D’Antonio

Hyperion, 226 pp., $22.95

ay it’s August, you’re outdoors, it’s dusk. You think you’re minding your own business, when chances are good something with a body the size and weight of a grape seed is minding your business too. That something is a mosquito, probably female and probably Culex pipiens. Here’s how you help her suck the blood right out from under you.

While you’ve been absentmindedly swatting the air, swatting your ankles, spilling your drink, you’ve also been exhaling carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Bad move. Sensors on the antennae of a mosquito really go for both, and your “scent plume,” which is heavier than air and circling your feet, is only making matters worse. Plus, all that arm action — you might as well be directing a dive bomber in for a pinpoint attack. The swatting is keeping you the target and the mosquito right on target thanks to her compound eyes, eyes that don’t miss a beat. (Nor do her wings, which are going at it between 250 and 500 times per second.)

Now it’s feeding time. Her “proboscis” has already probably probed you a good 20 times, but when her “stylets” go to work (like “a pair of electric carving knives”), get ready to lose a few micrograms of blood. And what you’ve lost the mosquito has gained in two to three times her weight. Now she’s struggling to get airborne and out of your way. If she makes it to safety, her digestive system will work for about 45 minutes drawing water from your blood and expelling it. That’s 45 minutes you have to strike back. Just be patient and on the lookout for any mosquito that’s sitting still and has pink droplets coming out of her anus, sure sign she, having gone from larva to pupa to bloodsucking adult, is now a sitting duck. Same for you. That saliva of hers, the stuff she just pumped into one of your venules or arterioles, could be the death of you, or have you never heard of yellow fever, malaria, dengue, or encephalitis?

Don’t know when I learned of those first three but do know I learned of encephalitis firsthand when it sent me, dizzy, to bed, age 7, for three weeks. A mosquito (“vector”) to blame? Who knows? New Yorkers heard about encephalitis a lot in 1999 when it killed birds, horses, and people and sent the whole city into a panic, a virus to blame for certain: the “West Nile” type and mosquito-borne.

The source for this and all the above information is the team of Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio in the pages of Mosquito, the latest in what is getting to be a long line of popular books on what one would think unpopular subjects aimed at an unscientifically trained audience. This new book is as interesting as any, perhaps of special interest to Memphians. For it was yellow fever in 1878 that cost the lives of more than 5,000 of its citizens (out of a population of 33,000). And it was in 1983 in a Memphis graveyard that the “tiger” mosquito, Aedes albopictus, was first identified in North America.

How did the tiger get here? Good question. What was it doing here? Having a great time. As Spielman, a senior investigator in tropical diseases at Harvard, and D’Antonio, past Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, explain, mosquitoes are just crazy about Memphis because the place is made-to-order: mild winters, hot summers, humid, filthy in the 19th century, worldwide importer and exporter of goods in the 20th, all that plus a wide river and standing water everywhere. (Ever tried getting water out of a tire that’s doing double-duty as a lawn ornament?) So what better breeding ground or distribution point could there be for these disease-carrying bloodsuckers? Well, New Orleans or Houston may have it worse, and plenty of poorer places across the globe have it much worse than New Orleans or Houston, which makes the continued incidence of yellow fever, malaria, dengue, and encephalitis, despite every effort, no joking matter.

Spielman and D’Antonio don’t joke either, but it must be Spielman who can write so admiringly of an insect whose sole purpose is self-preservation and D’Antonio who can write so admiringly of the work to rid the world of the diseases mosquitoes carry.

But FYI, in this summer of Jurassic Park III: Michael Crichton, in his novel Jurassic Park, suggested that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from a blood-filled, dinosaur-chewing mosquito trapped in amber. But Steven Spielberg, in the original film, showed us Toxorynchites, which the authors of Mosquito point out was one mosquito that did not depend on blood. “Its mouthparts are not up to the job.” No word from these authors on other blockbusting nuisances this August. But unlike Toxorynchites, Hollywood’s up to the job. In fact, it’s made it its job. It sucks.

Often I’m asked what’s new and worth reading. What I know never to answer is this: any book, read or unread by me, that is also: 1) award-winning, 2) American, and 3) fiction. Why is this? What is it that tells me that whoever’s putting the question does not want to hear about a contemporary American novel (a collection of contemporary short stories? c’mon), even if reviewers are all over themselves getting their two cents in (and earning about that much), even if the author is not exactly an unproven nobody, and even if the friends I’ve got are going on about it? Maybe the thinking goes this way, and maybe the thinking’s got something going for it:

“Award-winning”: must mean “literary,” which means “difficult.” Sounds, hell, is pretentious. I’m outta here.

“American”: must mean the book is: 1) disguised autobiography (ugh), 2) undisguised poetry (triple-ugh), or 3) a “meditation” on: A) loss (of what?) and B) redemption (from what? who knows? nevermind). Any which way, it’s bound to be a savage indictment of the way we live now. Real obvious stuff, depressing. You’re telling me?

“Fiction”: must mean storytelling from a storyteller who cannot, will not tell a good story because 1) the storyteller is too busy hogging all the attention, 2) the characters are too busy behaving unlike any human being anyone but a writer ever met, and 3) the story isn’t only not good, it’s preposterous.

Why do I think others think this? Well, I don’t first of all think all that much, nor do most readers who look to fiction to be first and foremost a source of pleasure, who want the pleasure of acknowledging that, you, dear storyteller, that sentence, phrase, word you wrote, there’s truth in it, you got it right. And I’ll remember you did a good job because the job you did, it was worth remembering, you got something across, something I recognize, but in no way I could’ve imagined.

And maybe this is what’s got B.R. Myers (who is this guy?) in a real rant in a lengthy essay (“A Reader’s Manifesto”) in the July/August Atlantic Monthly about authors (plus reviewers) I have never read (I am not proud to say) but for every one of the reasons I’ve just mentioned. Myers’ complaint: storytellers who cannot, will not tell a good story and a public hoodwinked into thinking they can and do. Literature, in other words, with a capital L. “Self-conscious, writerly prose.” Literary versus genre fiction. In short: writing, in too much of what is taken to be exemplary American fiction, that is, on closer inspection, “gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks” by writers who either “don’t make sense, or bore us to tears.” Case studies and choice comments:

On the reigning member of the American school of “Evocative” Prose (aka pseudo-poetry), here’s Myers on Annie Proulx (The Shipping News): “routinely incomprehensible,” “demands to be read quickly,” mistress of the mixed metaphor and the “standout” sentence. A writer incapable of butting out of the story she thinks she’s telling.

On the American school of “Muscular” Prose and its chief exponent, Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses etc.): “pseudo-archaic formulations,” “hit-and-miss verbiage,” writing in which it is “a rare passage that can make you look up … and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank.” Horse-sense? Nonsense!

On Don DeLillo (White Noise etc.) and the “Edgy” school: “patronizing,” “flat,” “tiresome,” “disjointed strings of elliptical statements,” portentous in his depiction of Consumerland America and flat-out wrong on the important subject of Americans and their supermarkets. Get real. Get out!

On Paul Auster (City of Glass etc.) and the abundant market for “Spare” (aka minimalist, aka lean) prose: “laborious wordiness [that] signals that this is avant-garde stuff,” whole chapters that “can be skimmed with impunity,” but a crafty writer when it comes to “the prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing: the harder it is to be pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no ideas at all.” But hey, anyone on the definition of “nominalism”?

And finally, “Generic ‘Literary’ Prose,” David Guterson and his Snow Falling on Cedars, a “verbal rubble”: an author who thinks it “more important to sound literary than to make sense,” an anti-genre genre writer whose “determinedly slow tempo” and “accumulation of pedestrian phrases” hope to fool the reader into thinking he’s achieved some “lyrical effect.” The academy’s verdict? Required reading in some sorry college classrooms. The verdict of “almost every fourth amateur reviewer on Amazon.com”? Repetitive. You say inmates are running the asylum?

Look here. Harold Bloom last year wrote a useful book called How to Read and Why and in it he told me to reread As I Lay Dying. I couldn’t do it. I mean, reread it, because I’d never read it in the first place. But I read it. And out of roughly 50 books this past year, it’s the one I think about still because it was great and I felt it was great from the moment I finished it, from the moment, in fact, I finished the opening sentence. Felt it, not thought it. Faulkner wrote it but Faulkner stayed out of it. How? Because it was a good story. It pleased me.

The Broken Places

By Susan Perabo

Simon & Schuster, 254 pp., $23

Susan Perabo has the unique distinction of being the author of a well-received book of short stories called Who I Was Supposed To Be and, as the first woman to play men’s NCAA baseball, being a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. What the one may or may not have to do with the other I have no idea, but a degree of calculated risk comes to mind. A too-calculated frame of mind can, however, put a freeze on writer and athlete both, and Perabo’s new novel, The Broken Places, is a case in point.

In the small town of Casey, Pennsylvania, a 12-year-old boy named Paul Tucker watches as his fireman father, Sonny, rescues a 16-year-old named Ian Finch from the basement rubble of an abandoned house. It was Ian, with his snarly attitude and swastika tattoo (a “goner” according to Paul’s schoolteacher mother, Laura), who caused the place to collapse when his homemade bomb brought the house down. Ian comes out saved, minus a foot, and Sonny comes out a national hero, minus a personality — or at least a personality Paul recognizes. In its place, Sonny, son of a legendary town fireman himself and the very emblem of an upstanding all-American, takes enthusiastically to the attention showered on him, bows to Ian’s every antisocial comment, and, by the time he gets to Hollywood to supervise a bogus made-for-TV version of the rescue, takes to alcohol, cigarettes, orneriness, crying jags, general obnoxiousness, and a level of inattention to Paul unbefitting a human being, much less a father. Now it’s Sonny who comes close to bringing his own house down. Laura, perpetual worry-wart and as tightly coiled as they come, for her part, back in Casey, pulls her own switcheroo by making a racket on Paul’s drums and wandering the house at all hours. Paul, a nice kid, doesn’t know what the hell is going on, tries valiantly to stick up for his father while sticking by his mother, then takes up with Ian to begin a good lesson in the time-honored tradition of family secrets. (For his part, Ian does some changing too: He starts off positively dangerous and graduates into mere loathsomeness.)

There is no arguing Perabo’s descriptive talent when it comes to setting and speech in The Broken Places. No use denying, either, the underlying, universal family dynamic she’s got going here: that most of us live most of our lives living up to or living down whatever or whoever came before us, each to his own to make his own separate peace. Or no separate peace if you’re Sonny Tucker, who enlists his wife into a kind of disappearing act in the space of months and to the bewilderment of his son. Do people in real life change this drastically this quickly and into their diametrical opposite this thoroughly? Do characters in fiction? Possibly, even in a strong novel with an even stronger design, as Perabo writes it. In a great novel, never.

The Catsitters

By James Wolcott

HarperCollins, 314 pp., $25

Wonders never cease. Or is it no wonder whenever a critic, in this case Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott, gets it into his head to write a comic novel and a fine eye for the asinine goes suddenly cloudy with sentimentality, predictability, and, when those two won’t do, impossibility — this in a book purporting to be a sophisticated take on the wild and wacky world of a single man of a certain age out of his league but on the make?

The man in question is Johnny Downs, a bartender-slash-actor in New York City and nice-enough guy but, all told, a little too nice for his own good and way too clueless to be a bartender-slash-actor in New York City. When his girlfriend two-times him, his friend Darlene, a calculating motormouth down in Georgia but no dummy in the romance department, enters the picture to telephonically pull Downs out of the dumps and wipe Downs’ heart off his sleeve. Darlene’s object: to turn him from doormat material into marriage material. Downs’ objects: a string of highly self-absorbed and equally high-driven New Yorky women Downs may find to his liking but you should find, with the exception of one, intolerable. Darlene’s winning way with object and objects both: witty and wise counsel when it isn’t cruel and unusual punishment, and Wolcott does right by keeping the details fresh, the tone brittle, the action furious, and Downs in keeping with Darlene’s every command.

Would that Wolcott had kept at it, too, rather than softening midway into The Catsitters. Better yet, would that Wolcott had given Downs something of a spine. Hard to do, though, when your protagonist at heart is a real softie and you don’t dare make him not too good to be true.

Water From a Bucket

By Charles Henri Ford

Turtle Point Press, 272 pp., $16.95 (paper)

It’s time Charles Henri (né Henry) Ford got some regional recognition to go with his international reputation, a reputation that rests on his long career as poet, painter, printmaker, photographer, filmmaker, publisher, and now, with Water From a Bucket, diarist. But first, know this:

Ford was born in 1908 in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, son of a hotel-owning father and artist mother and brother to future stage and screen actress Ruth Ford. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school, got his poetry into a number of small magazines, then took the ambitious step in 1929 of founding his own literary magazine out of Columbus, Mississippi: Blues: The Magazine of New Rhythms. William Carlos Williams served as a contributing editor, and together they sought and published the work of Ezra Pound, H.D., Kenneth Rexroth, Erskine Caldwell, and an unheard of newcomer by the name of Paul Bowles. Blues ran for only nine issues but its influence was felt. Ford’s name was on its way to being made.

He went to New York long enough to collaborate with film critic Parker Tyler on one novel, the groundbreakingly open and unapologetically gay (and banned) The Young and Evil, then left for Paris in 1931 to become guest of Gertrude Stein and roommate of Djuna Barnes, whose manuscript, Nightwood, he prepared for publication. He also fell into friendships with anyone who was artistically anybody — from expatriates Man Ray and Peggy Guggenheim to Edith Sitwell and Jean Cocteau. It was also in Paris in 1933 that Ford met and fell for surrealist painter Pavlik Tchelitchev, who was 35. Ford, a mere 24, stayed with him, in and out of love, for the next 25 years.

The two returned to New York, and in 1940 Ford founded another influential magazine, View, and for the next seven years he ran the work of the reigning European modernists and the work of stateside friends such as Joseph Cornell, in addition to publishing the first English translations of André Breton’s poems and the first monograph on Marcel Duchamp.

The late 1940s and ’50s, the period covered in Water From a Bucket, saw Ford and Tchelitchev hopscotching to and from Paris, Italy, New York, and Connecticut, and Ford making it down to Jasper, Tennessee, for his father’s dying illness. But when Tchelitchev died in 1958, Ford moved permanently to New York, where he still lives and where he made fresh starts in filmmaking (his underground classic Johnny Minotaur featured Allen Ginsberg) and in a new form, the “poem poster.” It’s an extraordinary career even without the fact of Ford’s own poetry, which stretches from the surrealistic to the “cut up” (a technique he was one of the first to explore) to his favored form today, haiku.

This background to Ford’s life is necessarily sketchy, but was it necessary that Lynne Tillman’s introductory remarks to the diary — a diary she had to coax Ford into publishing — be almost equally so? If, as the publisher states, the Ford family once lived in Memphis, for example, mention isn’t made here. Still, it’s the diary itself that counts, and Tillman is right to characterize Ford’s “epic poem about the dailiness of art and life” as an “itinerary of lived attitudes” delivered “in bits and pieces, a collage, or like [Ford’s] poems, a cut up.”

And like a cut up the bits come to us every which way: from the critical (Peggy Guggenheim’s “art collection is hard to look at, especially the messes signed Jackson Pollock”); to the chatty and/or catty (“‘Her characters are unreal,’ I say to Pavlik, talking about Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. ‘She’s unreal herself,’ he replies”); to the catty and/or chatty (“Osbert Sitwell used to call America the garbage can of Europe, but now he’s eating out of it”); to the ornery (“‘Rhymes, too, come from the unconscious,’ [Auden] told me. ‘They should stay there,’ I said”); to the reportorial (“I look at P.’s hemorrhoid [burst but healing] every night with the flashlight”); to the puzzling (“To walk like an Egyptian is to carry a ladder across Paris”); to the startling (“On how many shoulder-blades have you wanted to cut your throat?”); to the haunting (“A trembling duck being weighed in hand-scales: part of the trembling world, part of me”); to the self-incriminating (“‘You’re just a whore, that’s what you are,’ Pavlik tells me”); to the quotidian (“‘I’m not going to Canada with you unless you learn to suck — this jerking off business is boring'”); to the reassuring (“Anything that brings two people closer is, theoretically, good — even to eating each other’s excrements”); to the all-out icky (“Having read about the ‘insertions in the urethra’ in the Kinsey book I’m about to make an experiment …”).

“I loved the Blues before I loved the Poem,” Ford writes in May 1954 in Paris in a rare reference to his Southern roots. “Somehow the two loves were from the same source. So it was natural that I called my poetry review Blues. … Years of work, a burst of glory, and it’s all over.”

No, Mr. Ford, not all over quite yet. In Water From a Bucket, you come in still loud and clear.

Sylvia and Ted

By Emma Tennant

Henry Holt, 192 pp., $22

One of the most well-known scandals in literary circles is the suicide of poet and novelist Sylvia Plath and the subsequent condemnation of her husband, poet Ted Hughes, by Plath’s myriad fans. He is blamed for driving her to ruin, though she was admittedly suicidal from an early age, much like poor Virginia Woolf. Hughes, even today, decades later, is commonly booed at his readings. He’s been called a murderer in public. His surname is regularly chipped from Plath’s tombstone. Now, Emma Tennant, in fictional form in Sylvia and Ted, has lent her voice to the fray, and anyone looking for a more equitable approach must look elsewhere. Tennant, another of Hughes’ ex-lovers, is not exactly an unbiased chronicler — she wrote about her affair with Hughes in her book Burnt Diaries — and here she portrays Hughes as something just short of a demon, adding another suicide to his résumé. The author’s note at the beginning of the book is worth quoting in full: “Sylvia and Ted is the story of the twentieth century’s most famous — and most tragic — love affair, the marriage and separation of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Events described in the book are based in fact, and in the case of the story of Assia Wevill, Sylvia’s rival, who also committed suicide, many of the facts were previously concealed or unknown. Sylvia and Ted is, nevertheless, a work of the imagination.”

Okay. But what is most unreasonable, perhaps, is not Tennant’s agenda, which is quite clearly to pen a fictionalized account of the affair and cast Hughes in the role of Iago, but her hysterical and hyperbolic tone. Is this affair really the 20th century’s most famous and tragic? Of course not.

Tennant continues this overwrought approach in the book’s opening section, where she sketches a few quick incidents from the three characters’ childhoods. About Hughes’ childhood she writes: “In the boy’s childhood there is killing. The love of killing, the acceptance and necessity of killing. How can he tell what he must kill and what should be left alive?” The connotation is heavy-handed at the very least. And later, when Sylvia is a young poet in Cambridge and headed to hear a newly acclaimed British poet named Ted Hughes give a reading, Tennant writes: “Thus does Sylvia go forth to meet her doom.” This is melodrama, unfiltered and vitriolic.

Tennant’s portrait of the poets’ marriage is bleak, sad, and lacking any spark of love, yet we know there must have been some tenderness. Surely there is in the worst of marriages. “There is something wrong,” Tennant writes, “a wrongness that lies dormant. What is it? There is a silence and heaviness in Ted, who will sit an hour on the hillside, playing God with a colony of red ants.”

The author has concocted for her fictional biography an appropriately elliptical and poetic language, and she is capable of some beautiful and spare sentences. Unfortunately, overwritten excesses counterbalance these. “And, then the winter came, with Assia glowing in the heart of it like a red-shaded bedroom lamp you just can’t turn off” is an example of the kind of awful and attenuated writing she exhibits here. One wishes she had kept to her pared-down approach and tempered her telling with equipoise and wit, with some concrete storytelling. Sadly, the book smells of recrimination.

Example: “Sylvia has tried not to see this man as a killer. But she knows by now that he cannot walk across this land without the knowledge of where his next victim may lie: rook, pigeon, rabbit, hare. Ted kills, and he loves to kill.”

Get the picture? Tennant is writing with a sledgehammer. There is no light let in on her constricted view; the claustrophobia and dread, which may very well have characterized Hughes and Plath’s marriage, translates here into a story with no hallways off the main room of hell. There is only a straight line to unrepentant desperation: “His wife is caged,” Tennant writes, “her only freedom a further lunge downward to obscurity.”

Enough.

There is the stuff of a good novel in this tragedy of two poets coming together and creating one life that then splinters and sends insecure, sad Sylvia to her self-destruction, but Sylvia and Ted misses it by a wide margin. This brief book is a house of cards, an empty house, flimsy, short-lived, and insubstantial.

Emma Tennant, for all her damning implication, never really makes a tangible case against Ted Hughes. The question remains: Did his infidelity alone drive his wife to suicide? Or was it his “bloodthirsty” personality? After finishing Sylvia and Ted it’s hard to remember even one scene. And that’s the worst of it: Tennant, probably because of her contrived and vindictive intention going in, has failed to make two real people come alive for the reader.

The Naughty Bits:

The Steamiest and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes From the World’s Greatest Books

By Jack Murnighan

Three Rivers Press, 231 pp.,

$14 (paper)

PHOTO BY PHILLIP PARKER

Jack Murnighan, the man behind Nerve.com’s and Nerve magazine’s “Jack’s Naughty Bits,” has a new book out and guess what. It’s called The Naughty Bits ! And to start off we’ll head straight down, to the bottom, to the Old Testament, because in Murnighan’s closing pages and “for sheer quantity of nudge nudge,” the Bible, he declares, is “up there.” Getting “there,” though, is not half the fun. In fact, it’s more “like trying to distinguish body parts in scrambled adult channels on TV. If your attention wavers for even an instant, you risk missing the enchilada.”

What he means is you risk missing out not on Abraham and Sarah (too complicated), not on Sodom and Gomorrah (too obvious), not on the Song of Solomon (too poetic, yet its beautiful verses Murnighan recognizes) but on Deuteronomy 23:1, in which it is written: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” Why the testicularly challenged and unaccountably memberless should be denied Paradise Murninghan, who is not a theologian but the next best thing (a Ph.D. in medieval literature from Duke), chooses not to explain but merely to bring to your sweaty little hands and undivided attention. But if it’s the enchilada you want, that’s what he’s here to serve.

Take it or leave it that he happens also to be conducting you on a crash course in world literature. You know, the books you either once had half a mind to get to or, full-minded, dreaded ever seeing the sight of. But rest assured. Of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, even Dr. Jack, he of the “bourbon-addled memory,” admits that it’s read “in its entirety only by the real triathletes of literary studies.” What we get of Spenser is a scant 40 lines out of his unread thousands. The good Elizabethan topic? The fine art of flirting. This, though, is nothing.

The topic when it comes to the usual suspect, the man behind Ulysses: the fine art of rimming. But with this critical aside from the enlightening Murnighan, who, in his prefaces to these selections, is always and everywhere eye- if not mind-expanding: “Joyce opts for cadence and mellifluence instead of hard adjectives … and it’s a shame, for nothing would have given me more pleasure than to see the consummate wordsmith butt up against the aggressively corporeal — in all its ineffability.”

Praise be then, and more pleasure in the eyes of Murnighan, for his exciting excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — a scene of bowel-emptying love-making that could easily empty your stomach and send you, if not to the closest sink, to the closest dictionary to double-check your understanding of the word “ineffable.” (The “butt up” part we get but not nearly often enough.)

No dictionary required and no instance among “the world’s greatest books” in the case of Larry Flynt, who, as an “Unseemly Man,” had his way with, then wrung the neck of his beloved, a chicken. Poor chicken. Have you gotten a good look at the face on Larry Flynt? Or, for that matter, Jean Genet? Even so, Genet gets his too — no chicken, just a guy — and this unaccustomed bit of armchair psychoanalyzing from Murnighan so out “there” it may be true (but what of it?): “Genet seeks out these ‘queers who hate themselves,’ finding, perhaps, in their pained concessions to desire a Dantesque punishment for his own inescapable self-hatred.”

Well, at least Genet, damnation, was in good company. Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno, in what Murnighan calls “the most archetypal of all naughty bits in the history of literature,” gets pride of place, before and above the low-down we get from Lawrence, Roth, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, Donne, Hemingway, M.F.K. Fisher (!), Hesiod, Boccaccio, Erica Jong, Plato, Rabelais, George Eliot (!!), Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Sappho, Petronius, Ovid, Anonymous (?), Sade, Ariosto, Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, and for those who really know their international best-sellers, Thibaut de Champagne, John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester), the Pearl Poet, Johannes Secundus, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume IX. Plus, and get this, of all nonentities, Kenneth Starr, whose report, we’re informed, “was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story.” And I thought it was meant to be read as an attempted coup d’état.

But I, a sucker for the truth be told, even be it in a dead language, am sticking with the 2,000-year-old poems in Latin of Catullus, whose “bawdy and satiric lyrics,” Murnighan argues, “are some of history’s wittiest barbs.” He’s right. In poem LXIX, a certain Rufus is made not to wonder why “no woman/Wants to place her soft thigh under you …” The problem? This Rufus has got a “a mean goat in the armpit’s valley.” But that doesn’t compare to the double-trouble of a playboy named Amelius in XCVII. Jack Murnighan has done the work digging up this guy’s dirt. Your job’s to get wind of it.

Scheherazade Goes West:

Different Cultures, Different Harems

By Fatema Mernissi

Washington Square Press, 220 pp., $25.95

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale that began, as any good fairy tale must, as a tale of tragedy, and it went like this:

Good King Shahzaman, the happy ruler of “The Land of Samarcand,” returns to his palace one day only to find his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy. Enraged, Shahzaman kills them both then sets out for the Persian kingdom of his older and wiser brother, good King Shahrayar. One morning, however, Shahzaman, with that habit of being in the right place at the wrong time, happens to look out onto Shahrayar’s harem garden only to look in on still more monkey business: Shahrayar’s lady of the house in cahoots with a slave freshly swung from a tree and her retinue of slave girls magically transformed into 10 swinging couples up to their own business. Shahrayar gets wind of it, kills the whole unfaithful lot, then goes several steps (and heads) further by marrying then decapitating in revenge every virgin in sight. Except for one: daughter of the king’s vizier, Scheherazade, who keeps her head by filling the king’s with some tales of her own, the body of which we know as The Thousand and One Nights.

This makes Scheherazade, in the mind of Fatema Mernissi in the pages of Scheherazade Goes West, the one thing not one Westerner, she’s convinced, wants Scheherazade in truth to be: a political hero and self-liberator and on the following three fronts: knowledge, which would mean she’s an intellectual; words, which would mean she’s a cunning strategist; and cold blood, which would mean she’s a cool cookie. The very opposite, in other words, of what Western ideas and art — from Kant to Ingres to Delacroix to Matisse to Picasso to Diaghilev to Hollywood — have taken harem insiders in general to be, which, Mernissi argues, is basically ready, willing, and able, dumb-struck before the “male gaze” and stark naked while we’re at it. Why the misunderstanding? First, some understanding, from the Islamic point of view and to wit:

Muslim men expect their women to be “highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system” and, by extension, aware of the inequities in conduct and dress prescribed by present-day and fundamentalist Islamic societies. Background insight: Muslim men fundamentally fear women. Reason: Muslim men are full of self-doubt. Why? Because Islam, as a legal and cultural system, “is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable ‘other.'” Again because: It’s not the men who do the penetrating where it ultimately counts — the brain — but the women, what with their capacity to outthink and outwit men, which is, to men, the “essence” of sexual attraction. A man in love risks slavery, therefore locking women up makes rejection impossible. The Muslim fantasy in art nonetheless: “self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women.” Evidence: the story of Harun Ar-Rachid, “the sexy caliph,” born 766; the Muslim tradition in secular painting as propounded by Empress Nur-Jahan of India in the 16th century. Mernissi makes all these points and cases clear but only until she finds space to get to them and only after she dispenses a lot of chitchat, the ultimate mark reached when she discovers that she cannot fit into a size 6 skirt and blames Western mankind for it.

And what of the West’s historical response to Scheherazade? Kill her off, according to Edgar Allen Poe, who plainly feared her in his short story “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Beauty plus brains? A philosophical contradiction, according to Kant. Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque? “By spending months painting a beautiful woman,” Mernissi confidently concludes, “Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly!” Matisse? His passive odalisques “did not exist in the Orient!” And poor Hollywood? Maria Montez, Mernissi disposes of as a low-budget burlesque queen, and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra Mernissi cannot even bring herself to openly name as Montez’s high-end offspring. Muslim men at least have an inkling; Western men, we learn, haven’t a clue, until, that is, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publicly put the stamp on the “symbolic violence” perpetrated on women’s bodies and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth ran with the idea.

Other ideas in Scheherazade Goes West it’s up to you to run from. As in, in the author’s words: “Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death [in Poe’s story] upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris.” Or: “I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France. “

One idea, though, is way off the register. To talk herself down from the upset of a heart attack in France, Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist best known for her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, puts herself through what she calls “Arab psychotherapy,” which means “you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends.”

East may still be East; West, West. But on this centuries-tested and cross-cultural method of losing friends (never mind the attention of readers), there is no divide.

Life’s Only Promise

By Sid Kara

PublishAmerica, 269 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Sid Kara’s debut novel, Life’s Only Promise, is clearly a labor of love; a passionate cry against injustice by a young and idealistic writer.

Set in the Mississippi of the early 1900s, Kara’s book details the hollow promises of Emancipation and how they have already turned sour a few decades after the Civil War. Just as novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved depicted the harrowing, brutal world of slavery, Kara’s novel takes us into the harsh, subterranean world of chain gangs and forced labor.

Weaving historical fact with fiction, Life’s Only Promise tells the story of a black sharecropper named Fulton Chapman who leaves his home in 1905 in the hopes of finding a better life for himself and his young daughter, whom he leaves behind while he goes to find work on the railroad. A series of mishaps results in Fulton being wrongly convicted and leased to Parchman Farm, where he and the other “gunmen” are to pick cotton for the state.

Brutalized by the guards, tormented by the merciless Mississippi summers, weakened by the wretched living conditions and scarcity of food, Fulton endures the surrealness of his new surroundings. For a long time, only the memory of his old home and his waiting daughter sustain him. But as year piles upon year, the memories and hopes of reuniting with his family dim.

An aborted escape kills the last iota of hope in Fulton. The prisoners are tracked down by militiamen. Fulton jinxes his own escape by coming to the rescue of his beloved old friend, Moondog. Many of the recaptured prisoners die of their wounds and many others are lynched. Watching Moondog’s lynching freezes something inside Fulton’s heart and he spends the next several years in total silence. The squalor, violence, and brutality of Parchman have taken the energetic, hopeful young man that Fulton was when he entered the plantation and turned him into a dull, deadened, middle-aged zombie.

Kara, a native of Memphis, is particularly effective in describing the attitudes of a racist South in the first half of the 20th century. The sheer worthlessness of black life is made amply clear, as is the racial superiority and economic avarice that allowed places like Parchman to exist.

His portrayal of J.K. Vardaman, the racist governor of Mississippi, is particularly effective. Kara captures the combination of prejudice, malice, connivance, and populist bluster that elected Vardaman to the state’s highest office. And he shows how racism requires the collusion between politics and business interests in order to survive.

But Life’s Only Promise does not treat its black characters as one- dimensional victims. Over and over again, we see Fulton’s friends, such as Moondog and Corliss, display a fighting spirit. Much as their slave ancestors did during the slave rebellions, the gunmen refuse to go gently into the night and indeed go to their deaths with dignity and defiance. We also see that the yearning for freedom is as intrinsic as hunger or thirst and that this yearning propels Fulton and the others through their darkest hours.

Some of the passages in the novel that describe the treatment of the gunmen are so graphic and blood-splattered that they make the reader flinch. Occasionally, the violence borders on gratuitous but then one remembers that violence was the story of black men’s lives. Still, in the hands of a more mature writer, these passages could have been handled with more sophistication and sensitivity.

Kara’s youth comes through in the writing. For every passage that is smooth and direct, there is another where the writing is wordy, bombastic, and over-the-top. The phrase “unfulfilled dreams” pops up at least three times. Flowery sentences like “He felt the schism between his selves begin to buckle under the force of his memories, and he felt that he was losing control over the architecture of his being” are distressingly common and take away from the trajectory and emotional heft of the novel. Kara could have clearly benefited from a strict editor.

On the other hand, Kara has a good ear for dialogue. The rural Southern dialect and colloquialisms are realistic and never strained. They go a long way toward giving the novel its depth.

Kara, who graduated from Duke University in 1996, apparently gave up a career as an investment banker in order to finish this novel. He is already working on a second book that deals with the international trafficking in women. These are serious subjects for a young author to be tackling, and it is heartening to see that Sid Kara has avoided the pitfalls that besiege many a young writer: He has avoided the temptation of his first novel being a coming-of-age, thinly veiled autobiography.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

By Christopher Hitchens

Verso, 150 pp., $22

Exactly who and what is Dr. Henry A. Kissinger? Key expert in
government at Harvard in the late 1950s? Key instrument of Republican Party
politicos in Indochina in the mid-’60s? National security advisor under Nixon
and Ford? Secretary of state under Nixon and Ford? Engineer behind Nixon’s
trip to China in 1972? Nobel Peace Prize co-winner in 1973? The answer, of
course, is all of the above, and all of the above, of course, is on the
record.

But, off the record, what manner of man is he? “An odious
schlump who made war gladly” was novelist Joseph Heller’s
assessment of Kissinger in Good as Gold. “A mediocre and
opportunist academic” intent on becoming “an international
potentate” is Christopher Hitchens putting it mildly in The Trial of
Henry Kissinger. Putting it not so mildly he also calls Kissinger (in
short) “a stupendous liar” and (at length) “a man at home in
the world and on top of his brief” but a Candide too: “naive, and
ill-prepared for and easily unhorsed by events,” a man whose writings and
speeches “are heavily larded with rhetoric about ‘credibility’ and the
need to impress friend and foe with the mettle of American resolve” but
one who, “in response to any inquiry that might implicate him in crime
and fiasco, … rushes to humiliate his own country and its professional
servants.”

Humiliating country and countrymen may mark Kissinger the man,
but Hitchens means to mark Kissinger a master criminal, which, if you follow
the complicated paper trail that Hitchens documents in this book, could and
should land the good doctor in an international court of law. The crimes,
according to Hitchens, are these:

1) Kissinger’s deliberate sabotaging of Johnson’s Vietnam
peace plan in Paris in order to get his own man, Nixon, elected in 1968. Four
years later, Nixon presents the same plan and ends the war, and an additional
31,205 American servicemen and 475,609 of the enemy forces lose their lives.
In that same period, more than 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian
civilians are unnecessarily killed, injured, or rendered homeless.
(Congratulations, Dr. Kissinger, on that Nobel!)

2) Kissinger’s tacit approval of: A) Pakistan’s takeover
of Bangladesh in 1971 and B) the kidnapping and murder of Bangladesh’s
democratically elected leader. The “secret diplomacy” that kept the
country destabilized for the following four years — four years during which
somewhere between half a million and 3 million Bengali civilians (estimates
vary) were killed — had two aims: U.S. interest in a Pakistani intermediary
who could speed a possible détente between the U.S. and China;
America’s interest in showing China that we stand by our friends and Pakistan
is a friend. (Screw India.)

3) Kissinger’s “direct collusion” in the U.S.-
financed and U.S.-armed 1970 kidnapping and murder of General René
Schneider of Chile, who opposed any military interference in the free election
of Salvador Allende as president. Hitchens calls this act, plain and simple,
“a hit — a piece of state-supported terrorism” designed to
destabilize the democratic government of a country with which the U.S. was not
at war. (Good going, General Pinochet!)

4) Kissinger’s advance knowledge of a plan to depose and
kill Cyprus’ president and overthrow its democratic government — this in
order to satisfy the territorial hunger of the dictatorship in Athens and to
protect U.S. air and intelligence bases in Greece. The coup in 1974 led to the
deaths of thousands of civilians and the uprooting of almost 200,000 refugees.
(Sorry, Cyprus.)

5) Kissinger’s (and Gerald Ford’s) full knowledge and
support of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, during which a
combination of mass slaughter and deliberate starvation resulted in the
deaths, according to Amnesty International estimates, of 200,000 people.
(Congratulations, General Suharto!)

6) Kissinger’s personal involvement in a plan “to
abduct and interrogate, and almost certainly kill,” a Greek journalist
working in Washington who vocally opposed his country’s authoritarian regime
and who vocally reminded readers of that regime’s financial ties to the Nixon
White House. (So sorry, free press.)

Is this sordid stuff really only the stuff of realpolitik,
whatever the world hot spot, whoever the U.S. head, wherever the goon squad?
Or are we talking here, when we talk of Henry Kissinger, about a clear and
still-present danger? About crimes against humanity, crimes beneath the
heading “business as usual” (aka “diplomacy”) as enacted
by a pudgy man with a zombie countenance but a man with (Hitchens’ words)
“the authentic touch of raw and unapologetic power”?

You be the judge because someone has to be and because it won’t
be, officially, the United States, which believes itself immune from the truth
and reconciliation commissions being conducted by “lesser” nations
today, immune from international human rights laws, immune from international
criminal law, and immune from the law of civil remedies, a country only too
happy to continue dressing Kissinger up in what Hitchens calls “the cloak
of immunity that has shrouded him until now.”

“Until now” because Hitchens, who treats this material
with none of his easily digestible,Vanity Fair brand of broadside,
means to dress Kissinger seriously down, whether you can or cannot keep up
with the chronology of events Hitchens describes, can or cannot keep tabs on
Kissinger’s highly profitable and private, big-business deals, can or cannot
decipher the damaging evidence in the often heavily redacted CIA cables, White
House journals, declassifed documents, and memorandums he heavily quotes, can
or cannot keep count of the shady doings of the Kissinger-headed “40
Committee,” or can or cannot distinguish between an already-seedy
“Track One” line of diplomatic skullduggery from the even seedier
parts one and two of “Track Two.”

Henry Kissinger has deeded his papers to the Library of Congress
on the stipulation that they not be examined until after his death. If
Christopher Hitchens doesn’t do the doctor’s reputation in, time can tell and
just maybe justice will. — Leonard Gill

Monstruary

By Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you
have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world
of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but you’re blindfolded. Providing narration
for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly
alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of
Monstruary.

Rios’ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish
by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity,
though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of Joyce’s
— albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our
writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and
acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-
luck love. The title of the book comes from Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-
series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but
one thing in common: chilling imagery.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la
Bosch before his brush touches canvas: “Ill-assorted multitudes of human
figures with the heads of animals and all kinds of beasts and insects with the
heads of men and women. … A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch. A
carp with the head of a duck.”

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details
of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re intermittently taken on descriptive
roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind
of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by
unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with
possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narrator’s ubiquitous plays on words,
obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! —
of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character
is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun
is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not
echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this:
“That delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of
De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where
dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole
staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss,
pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate
columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators
astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll lose
interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the
sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But
there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very
challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You
just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles.
The meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if
you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton
candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside
the car at all times. — Jeremy Spencer