Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.

In the summer of 1905, when he was 27, Robert Walser had just published his first book and decided to move to Berlin to live with his brother, a successful stage-set designer.  Berlin Stories is a collection of . . . well, not really “stories” — sketches, ruminations, bursts of thought – about Berlin.  The book itself is divided into four sections: ”The City Streets,” “The Theater,” and “Berlin Life” contain pieces written mostly between 1907 and 1911 (the years during which he also wrote and published The Tanners (my review here), The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten); the final section, “Looking Back,” contains pieces written up to 1917, after he had left Berlin.  The pieces are each very short, most only two or three pages, with sentences that run on and on, filled with energy.

It’s primarily in the early pieces that we see such punch and thirst for life.  The first piece in the book, written in 1907, is entitled, “Good morning, Giantess!” and here Walser wanders out early, before traffic begins, into the streets of Berlin.  Soon the early risers start coming out into the street, and Walser laps in the variety:

You encounter eyes as you walk along like this: girls’ eyes and the eyes of men, mirthless and gay; legs are trotting behind and before you, and you too are legging along as best you can, gazing with your own eyes, glancing the same glances as everyone else.  And each breast bears some somnolent secret, each head is haunted by some melancholy or inspiring thought.  Splendid, splendid.

“Beautiful park, I think, beautiful park” ends another piece that Walser, filled with wonder, wrote in 1907.  The crowds of people continually enthralled him.  He would describe the mass as a collective whole and then break it apart, looking into the heart of the individuals, often providing the darker parts of the sketches.  “Friedrichstrasse,” one of my favorite pieces, describes a busy street during the day, but look how things change when Walser examines the street as night falls, recognizing something deep in each of his fellows:

and yet: what a ravishing, beguiling haste can be seen in all this ostensible packed-in-ness and sober-mindedness.  The sun shines here upon countless heads in a single hour, the rain dampens and drenches a ground that is anointed, as it were, with comedies and tragedies, and in the evening, ah, when it begins to grow dark and the lamps are lit, a curtain slowly rises to reveal a play that is always sumptuously full of the same habits, acts of lechery, and occurrences.  The siren Pleasure then begins to sing her divinely enticing, heavenly notes, and souls burst asunder amid all these vibrating wants and dissatisfactions, and a disgorging of money then commences that baffles the modest, clever understanding and can scarcely be envisioned, even with effort, by the poetic imagination.  A bodily dream rising and falling with voluptuous breath then descends upon the street, and everything races, races, races with uncertain step in pursuit of this all-encompassing dream.

Berlin Stories isn’t the easiest book to review.  As I mentioned, most of these aren’t traditional stories and, other than being about “Berlin,” there is no other continuity.  But the composition of the collection itself is quite brilliant and offers a narrative of Walser’s time.  We see Walser on that first page bursting out into the empty streets of the early morning, and the pieces that follow show Walser getting to know the busy city.  Then we read Walser’s thoughts on the theater, where he spent considerable time since his brother was such a success.  Then, if the sketches in “The City Streets” were bustling, “Berlin Life” steps back and lets a bit more silence enter.  But not as much as comes in the final section, “Looking Back.”  I said above, ”It seems impossible to get from such exuberance to that lonely Christmas Day.”  These final pieces retain the vibrancy and lust for life that the earlier ones had, but the tone is a bit more subdued and a sense of loss pervades.

This little collection concludes its narrative with a piece from 1917 entitled “A Homecoming in the Snow,” so we almost get to that Christmas Day, after all, though the tone here mingles with sweetness:

On my way home, which struck me as splendid, it was snowing in thick, warm, large flakes.  It seemed to me as if I heard homeland-like sounds ringing out from afar.  My steps were brisk despite the deep snow through which I was assiduously wading.  With every step I took, my shaken trust grew firmer again, which filled me with joy the way a child rejoices.  All former things bloomed fragrantly and youthfully in my direction, like roses.  It almost appeared to me as if the earth were singing a sweet Christmas melody that was at the same time a melody of spring. [. . .]  I considered the snow itself a splendidly warm coat.

Perhaps I’ve been looking at that Christmas Day in 1956 all wrong all this time.

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It isn’t a secret to anyone who has followed this blog in the past that I’m a huge fan of Maile Meloy’s short fiction.  I loved her excellent debut collection, Half in Love, and cannot praise enough her even better follow-up, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (my review of Half in Love here; of Both Ways here).  I was thrilled, then, to see that she was back with this week’s New Yorker story.  I was doubly thrilled to see that it begins in Montana, where my favorites of her stories take place.

“The Proxy Marriage” focuses on the love that William, an awkward and shy boy, has for Bridey Taylor, a confident singer who wants to become an actress.  The story begins when each is in high school, looking forward to a life beyond the small town they are growing up in.  Though William loves Bridey desperately, he is under no illusion that his future will include her in any greater role than she already plays.  He hasn’t the courage to ask her out.  In fact, after another boy has asked Bridey out, told her that he has already accomplished two of the three goals he has for high school, and that he thinks she can help him with the third, which is to have a serious girlfriend, Bridey laughs to William, “He was so earnest.”  Then, “William made a mental note never to be earnest with Bridey.”

Bridey’s father is an attorney.  As it turns out, Montana is one of the few states to allow proxy marriages and the only state to allow double proxy marriages, where neither person has to be present.  Due to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is quite a demand for these types of marriages, and Bridey’s father asks William and Bridey to act as the proxies.  Of course, the prospect of even a proxy marriage to Bridey makes William unable to speak straight.  He accepts and shows up to the ceremony dressed in a suit.  Bridey hasn’t taken it nearly as seriously.

“You look nice,” she said.  There was annoyance in her voice.

“Thank you,” he said, mortified.

Bridey looked like an ordinary girl in a sullen mood, not like the love of anyone’s life, and he felt a flicker of hope — not that she would ever come to love him, but that someday he might not be in thrall to her, he might be free.  She was chewing gum.

We feel for William for whom this love is a torture, especially as we see him recognize that peace might come if he could only stop loving her.  Even when they both go to school in different states, and even when they are both finished with school and seeking stability.  In expert fashion, Meloy quickens the narrative pace, while showing us that through the passage of the years William’s feelings do not change. 

Bridey laughed, and then it turned into something like a sob.  “Maybe my mother was right,” she said.  “I’m just not pretty enough.”

“Bridey,” he said.  “You’ve been there eight months.”

But they had the same conversation after two years, then three. [. . . .]  Sometimes he went weeks without thinking of Bridey, and sometimes she haunted him.  Then came a year when there were no calls, no e-mails, no word.

The years continue to pass, and William cannot remove himself from his feelings for Bridey; it doesn’t help that any time both are visiting home and are free they participate in proxy marriages.  William spends much of him time resenting his feelings, even suspecting that Auden’s line — “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me” — is just an example that proves “[t]he role of the human brain was to rationalize suffering.”

This isn’t my favorite of Meloy’s stories, but I still loved being back in her world where the writing is succinct and direct.  There’s no evasion here, as we learn the story of William’s love through the years.  Highly recommended.

Review copy courtesy of Open Letter.

The Cyclist Conspiracy is a fun, mad-dash read through letters, lost manuscripts, research papers, stories, poems, dialogues, diagrams, and anything else you can imagine compiling for a book about some secret and ancient cult of cyclists. 

The first thing in the book is an Editor’s Preface, signed by S.B.  Here S.B. briefly tells about an autumn evening he spent looking through the piles of books and papers in the cellar of the Municipal Library in Bajina Bašta, where he had retreated to take “refuge from sadness the cause of which I still cannot mention.”  There he came across The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale, published in Zürich in 1903.  This book, which has taken who knows what path to get to the cellar of the Bajina Bašta’s Municipal Library, is the third of only six copies printed.  Indeed, publishing six copies and then sending each copy someplace in the world where it would find the right reader seemed was to be the book’s standard mode of dissemination because that right reader would then publish six copies and send them around, etc.  S.B. has breached this protocol — any one of us can buy and read this book now – but he did this for a purpose:

In handing this collection over to the reader, I realize that several years ago, searching for colored pebbles, I came across a pearl, but also that the pearl had been awaiting a proper owner and found an improper one instead, who would turn it into a glass bauble by reduplicating it in an insufferably large number of copies.  The only justification is that, in our time, which falls within the autumn of the year of years (about which Captain Queensdale speaks), even the sparkle of a glass bauble shines through the darkness gathering on the horizon.

The book then steps back into history to the reign of the apocryphal king (because he himself wrote history so that he would appear to be apocryphal (or he really is apocryphal)) Charles the Hideous, a man who can see the future and the past.  One day, a group of Two-Wheelers exiled from Paris come to Charles’ court.  They bring a clay tablet containing The Book of Javan the Son of Nahor (“to those yet unborn”).  They tell him of a great project: the Tower of Babel will be rebuilt.  This is just the beginning.  Charles invokes Freud, and later it turns out Freud himself is a member of the conspiracy and a character whose writings will appear in this book.

Much of the fun to be had here (but not all) is in finding new characters and following their relationship with the cyclists.  For example, who is Captain Queensdale, whose manuscript S.B. found at the beginning?  He was a ship captain who, in 1761, was the sole survivor of a shipwreck.  He ended up on an island north of Iceland where he finds a community of cyclists.  Who published that manuscript in Zürich in 1903?  That was Rheiner Meier, another of the novel’s characters, and a bit of a skeptic.  Here is his introduction to the six volumes he had published and sent around the world:

It is possible that the whole thing is a joke.  Someone with an English sense of humor (the copyist is English) is doubtlessly willing to undertake extensive and expensive preparations in order to, after his own death, make fools of a small group of unknown people.

We are also pleased to find a missing Sherlock Holmes story, entitled “The Final Case of Sherlock Holmes: The Maniacal Cyclist.”  A small piece to the puzzle that is The Cyclist Conspiracy (though the first where we see a cyclist going around smashing random clocks), this brief story was a large part of the fun.

And it keeps going through journals, treatises, illustrations, constellations, symbology, etc.  We learn about a master plan to build the Grand Insane Asylum, which will have capacity for 20 million.  Indeed, the conspiracy is so large that one can be part of it and never know it.  The pieces of the puzzle keep coming and with them come switchbacks, half-truths, contradictions, blatant misinformation — in other words, history.

So, yes, this is a fun, though intricate (requiring some give and patience) read, but there’s more to it, a darkness suggested about the workings of men and the presence of history in the present.  There are many reasons the bicycle is the chosen symbol to represent so much, but we know it could have been almost anything else.  What feels right, fated, even fore-known, is arbitrary, and the Grand Insane Asylum, whose details are lovingly described by a certain inmate, seems a good fit for more than 20 million.  Indeed, why didn’t S.B. just retreat to that library cellar?  Because no matter what the sadness was that drove him there to begin with, there’s something invigorating about chasing down darkness on this scale.

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I’ve had my eye on Peter Stamm for a while now because one of the best translators working today, Michael Hofmann (son of Gert Hofmann, whose work I’ve loved — see here), has been steadily translating Stamm’s work over the years.  It’s one of those things: If Hofmann finds it worth translating it must be worth reading.  Still, I haven’t taken the dive.  After reading this exceptional story, I must rectify that.

On the surface, this is a simple story.  Two young people have left their homes and their parents to make a life with each other, starting out in a shabby apartment above a restaurant along the train tracks.  Lara is twenty-one and Simon is twenty-four.  They’ve been living together for four months.  It’s a beautiful time.  Though Lara finishes work well before Simon, she still waits for him so they can take the bus home together.  That’s where this story begins, a bus ride home.

Stamm expresses this time of happiness incredibly well.  This young couple is independent for the first time, and the strangest, most mundane things have a deep significance as they start their life together:

“Do we need milk?” “You know, the coffee’s almost gone.” “We’re out of garbage bags.” Sentences like that had an unexpected charm, and a full shopping cart was like an emblem of the fulfilled life that lay before them.  When Simon wheeled it into the underground parking garage, with Lara at his side, she felt a deep pride and a curious satisfaction at being so grown up and independent.

But this portrait of a new life is rendered even better since Stamm allows doubt and insecurity to lurk just below the surface.  It’s constant and yet not unbearable.  In other words, unlike many stories of this type, Stamm is not leading the reader to assume this is the beginning of the end for this couple.  They are happy and insecure, a bit anxious, just like most of us would be in this situation.

Even without any additional elements, I’d still think this was one of the best stories of the year.  However, Stamm introduces something new.  At the beginning of the story, on the bus ride, Lara notices a mysterious man in a black coat.  He gets off the bus, and a few times in the rest of the story she swears she sees him.  Finally, she flips on the television and there he is, giving an interview.  It turns out he is a writer, and he is discussing how on the bus earlier that day he saw a young couple he would like to write about.  Now, it’s not what we might expect: Stamm may or may not be that writer, but that’s not the point.  The writer speaks about the time in his own life when he was first with a woman with whom he wanted to start a family, before something got in the way: ”But I’ve never felt so sure of anything as I did then, before I really knew the first thing about living.”

• Stone Upon Stone, by Wieslaw Mysliwski, tr. from the Polish by Bill Johnston

I haven’t reviewed this book yet, but I finished it a few weeks ago and had a feeling it would win.  It is superb, and I do (and will) highly recommend it.  The award is young, but this is the second time that Archipelago Books published the winning title . . . meaning if you’re not familiar with them, you should be.

Click here for the announcement on the Three Percent blog.

Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.

Please note that I’m not in any way an expert on Victor Serge or his philosophies.  While my minor as an undergrad was in modern European history, with a particular interest in the early twentieth century, I’m no longer so naïve as to think those few courses in any way gave me the ability to speak cogently on Marxism or on the Russian Revolution.  So this “review” will not engage with the text as a body of philosophy.  Just know that it is a fascinating perspective on a fascinating time in history by a masterful writer.  I do know that much now.

Victor Serge (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich; 1890 – 1947) was born in Brussells to exiled Russian anti-Tsarists.  In fact, this book begins with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ten years before Serge was born.  One of the men executed due to his role in the assassination was Nikolai Ivanovich Kibalchich, a distant relative.  While Serge grew up, his parents kept on the wall a picture of those hanged for the assassination.  That said, so powerful are Serge’s impressions from his youth that one feels he came to his views independently of his parents:

Even before I emerged from childhood, I seem to have experienced, deeply at heart, that paradoxical feeling which was to dominate me all through the first part of my life: that of living in a world without any possible escape.  I felt repugnance, mingled with wrath and indignation, towards the people whom I saw settled comfortably in this world.  How could they not be conscious of their captivity, of their unrighteousness?  All this was a result, as I can see today, of my upbringing as the son of revolutionary exiles, tossed into the great cities of the West by the first political hurricanes blowing over Russia.

In its structure, the book is a chronological account of Serge’s life.  Or, rather, it is a chronological account of the events Serge witnessed and the other revolutionaries Serge knew.  There are powerful personal moments, such as the moment when Serge’s younger brother was dying of malnutrition: “I saw him wasting away.  ‘If you don’t eat,’ I told him, ‘you’re going to die’ — but I had no idea what it was to die, and he even less so, so it did not frighten us.”  And though he and his father “alone together” go to the cemetery, all of this that is personal is rather meant to direct our attention to the common plight of the group.  Serge, who says he prefers “we” to “I,” doesn’t allow this memoir to focus on him.  After a childhood where he thought life meant “Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry,” Serge eventually adds “Thou shalt fight back.”  This book is about that fight, which Serge joined very young, and the fighters lost on the way.

The principal opponent: capitalism, a system he saw as inherently corrupt and degrading, and he certainly found people who agreed with him:

“What do you want to be?” the anarchist asked young people in the middle of their studies.  “Lawyers, to invoke the law of the rich, which is unjust by definition?  Doctors, to tend the rich, and prescribe good food, fresh air, and rest to the consumptives of the slum?  Architects, to house the landlords in comfort?  Look around you, and then examine your conscience.  Do you not understand that your duty is quite different: to ally yourselves with the exploited, and to work for the destruction of an intolerable system.”

Something I found very interesting is the tone in which Serge relates the early chapters of his life, which he wrote toward the end of his life, well after seeing the intolerable Stalinist regime take over in Russia.  In other words, he is faithful to the feelings and tone of his youth, even if as an older man he might find some of the things slightly naïve, or at least much more complicated.  Part of the reason, I suspect, is because as an older man he still believes in his younger self.  Some of his ideas could be steered devastatingly off-course by the wrong person, but he remains confident that his ideas, that his pursuit for a more just society (knowing it was impossible, but what else should one do with one’s time), are correct.

This in and of itself leads to some interesting conundrums that Serge seemed to struggle with.  For example, as a youth he wrote: “Life is not such a great benefit that it is wrong to lose it or criminal to take it.”  That is a pithy line and easiest to digest if the cause one is dying for or killing for is one’s own.  It’s obvious Serge still believes this even as an older man, but he has lived long enough to witness the unjust murder of many in an effort to prop up one of the most terrible regimes in the twentieth century.  Through the book, I don’t think he ever fully reconciles his idea that violence is sometimes justified (though he abhorred it) with the idea that what is justified is a matter of perspective.

Serge does offer up some potential ways to get around this, though I don’t find them very convincing.  For one thing, Serge was always against censorship.  One of the failings of the Russian Revolution was that very soon after the government was toppled, the new government suppressed contrarian thought.  It seems that the newly formed government recognized that dissent and anarchism was dangerous; after all, what majestic terrors had they been able to accomplish through just such means?  But such suppression of thought went against something Serge felt even as a young man in Paris when he gazed out his window at Rodin’s The Thinker:  “The bronze Thinker seemed to me to be meditating on that crime, and waiting to be shot himself.  After all, how insolent he was, doing nothing but thinking, and how dangerous if he ever came to a conclusion.”

It’s a danger Serge knew his entire life.  In one of the excellent introductions to this volume, Adam Hochschild remarks that Serge’s style is the result of urgency, of having many important things to write but not much time to do it before the authorities, whichever ones he was agitating at the time, would bust in and enact who knows what kind of violence. 

And the book is filled with violence.  The cast of characters is huge, and it seems that on every page one of them is shot or commits suicide, leading Serge to the conclusion that “my very existence was an infraction of the unwritten law of conformity.”

So, whatever your views on Serge’s ideas, here is a supreme volume where one can engage with such ideas from a clear and articulate mind, and one genuinely compassionate, perhaps a rare combination as the conversations go on in the news these days.

Review copy courtesy of Ecco Books.

The cove of this story is situated in North Carolina.  In the novel’s brief prologue, which takes place in the late-1940s, a TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) worker has arrived at the town of Mars Hill.  Used to being despised (in part because of his Kansas accent), the government worker is a bit taken back when the residents of Mars Hill show no signs of resistance when he says he’s come to create a new lake that will bury the old cove.  “You can’t bury that cove deep enough for me, an older man named Parton said, and those sharing the store bench with him nodded in agreement.”  The only real push-back he has received is from a college professor who thinks the cove may be the last habitat for the Carolina Parakeet.  The man proceeds to check out the cove itself, feeling “how little this place would change once underwater.  Already dark and silent.”  A slightly misleading tone is set when he finds a well, dips the bucket deep to the water, and pulls out a human skull.

The remainder of the novel takes us back to the last year of World War I.  Laurel and Hank Shelton are brother and sister.  Their parents moved to the cove but have since died, seeming to confirm what people have thought all along: the cove is a cursed place.  “The Cherokee had stayed away from the cove, and the first white family to settle here had all died of smallpox.”  Hank has recently returned home from the war with only one hand.  Their only help comes from an 81-year-old man named Slidell.  We find out that “[e]ven Preacher Goins, who’d bibled her mother’s funeral, made sure he left before dark.  He hadn’t taken Laurel’s hand or hugged her and Laurel knew the why of that too.”  So Laurel, shunned because people think the cove has taken her over and that she’s a witch (though she’s never done anything to harm anyone), lives an incredibly lonely life with little prospect of happiness.  She doesn’t even know what happiness would feel like.

One day, Laurel thinks she hears a Carolina Parakeet singing.  She investigates and, to her surprise, she finds a strange man playing a silver flute.  She spies on him for a few days until she finds him sick, finally taking him to her cabin and telling Hank about the stranger.  I don’t think I need to elaborate on any of the details here; it is sufficient to say that this plays out much like we might expect: both Hank and Laurel overcome any early misgivings they have about the stranger, whose name, they find out, is Walter.  Walter cannot talk, but he shows he’s a hard worker.  There is no reason to distrust this musician whose simply trying to find his way back to New York.

Knowing she’s being a bit forward and probably very presumptuous, Laurel allows her thoughts to wander.  Perhaps Walter’s arrival is the beginning of a lifetime of happiness.  Hank thinks so too.  At least, they both hope, and Hank starts doing what he can to give them some alone time:

It seemed a safe time, especially since she’d been drinking the tonic.  There’d be some women who’d hope they weren’t fallow.  They’d think getting with child would snare Walter into staying, but Laurel knew of men who’d seeded a chap and then run off.  They’d left behind their kin and work and sometimes even farms, lots more than what Walter would leave.

One of the strengths of The Cove is the internal life of Laurel.  Rash takes us to her tragic schooldays, where she lost her virginity to a boy trying to win a bet, and deep into her mind where she constantly has to reassure herself that what she sees is real — that she herself is real.  Many pages are devoted to her performing chores while we follow her thoughts as they meander through switchbacks about what she wants or doesn’t want.  For me one of the weaknesses of The Cove is that when it ventures out of Laurel’s thoughts it actually seems less real.

For example, another character whose thoughts we follow is Chauncey Feith, the 26-year-old rich boy who didn’t go to war.  We know his type well: he’s an insecure coward who tries to cover his deficiencies up by bullying others, gathering around him as many younger disciples as he can (only a few).  Rash depicts the embarrassing thoughts of Chauncey incredibly well, but his character — as familiar as he may be to us from real life — comes across as a plot device.  A villain for the sake of having a villain who can threaten the growing happiness in the cove.  

Another thing that seemed a bit unreal: the growing happiness in the cove.  It’s one thing to have Laurel imagining such hopelessly romantic thoughts as this: “This is how it’ll be, Laurel though, hours and hours I won’t say much and he won’t say anything, but he can show me with his eyes and touches that he loves me.”  It’s another to have that be pretty much exactly what happens.  Consequently, the story becomes much more about a rather simplistic plot than about the internal lives of these characters.

But let me end with another thing that felt real: the loneliness.  Rash’s cove is uncomfortably lightless.  Though we don’t feel threatened there, we do feel how alone these characters are, how much their local society has pushed them away as an outlet to their meanness which they mask by superstition.  As much as we might begin to feel the book follows an uninteresting and conventional line when things begin to work out for Laurel and Walter, we actually do want them to be happy.

Still, in the end I was disappointed that even the threat to their happiness was predictably plotted.  So as much as I enjoyed the more lonely moments in the cove (Rash reall is an excellent writer of atmosphere), I didn’t particularly enjoy the book.  Time for me to seek out Rash’s back catalog, which I have reason to suspect will be more rewarding and to my tastes.

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This is a strange little story I can’t quite make sense of — though I did enjoy it.  The narrator is an older woman looking back to when she was seven and spent a few weeks with her grandparents while her own parents prepared for the birth of a sibling.  The opening paragraph is great as it introduces the perhaps slightly paranoid world of her grandparents.  First, we meet the guard dog, Nero, who at night is set out to pace in front of the cash register in the grandparents’ grocery store.  Then we meet the grandfather who “slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other.  This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.”

While the little girl is there, she witnesses the development of parallel love stories.  Her uncle Jurgen is secretly courting the grocery store’s bookkeeper, Priscilla Gamrod.  Priscilla has a “mean snub-nosed cocker spaniel named Mitts,” and every day Nero spends his time trying to figure out a way over the fence to find Mitts. 

Both love affairs seem doomed.  For one, Nero is hardly trained for love.  While the smaller dogs are treated with affection, Nero is handled at a distance, the thinking being that the lack of human affection will make the dog more apt to going after any perceived threat.  As for Jurgen and Priscilla, there’s Priscilla’s father standing in the way. 

Priscilla was twenty-five, but she still lived with him.  Her mother had died, leaving the two of them bound by a grief that eased with time but was replaced by Mr. Gamrod’s jealous dependence.  This had got so bad that he insisted on fighting any man who tried to court her.  He’d beaten them all.

When Mr. Gamrod finds out about the relationship, he and Jurgen schedule a time and place for the fight. 

I won’t go into how the story moves from here, but one of the interesting aspects of the story is the relationship between Jurgen and Nero and between the narrator and Nero.  Jurgen is a bit small, his muscles stringy and tight.  No one thinks he’s going to win the fight, but he goes calmly.  It’s the same kind of calm he has when we see him subduing animals, such as those he needs to wrestle before their slaughter and even Mitts, whom he flicks on the nose each time she bites his hand until “Jurgen is inevitable.”  He doesn’t subdue Nero, though, for the reasons already laid out.  Nero is high-strung and destructive, almost mad.

How does the little girl fit into all of this?  I’m working this out, enjoyably.  We see that she has a connection with Nero that no one else has.  She sympathizes with him and even feels in him a kindred spirit:  “For I had a confused sensation that we were both captive — in different bodies, true, but with only one dark way out.”  Later in the story, we learn of another connection the little girl has with a wild animal, that time with an escaped python who slithered over to the terrified girl, touched her cheek with its tongue, and then moved on.

So there are a several interlacing elements in this story, and I haven’t quite reconciled them all.  In fact, I I believe my ultimate estimation of the story will be dependent on that reconciliation; at this time, I’d still recommend Erdrich’s last New Yorker story, “The Yeard of My Birth” (thoughts here) over this one, but “Nero” is an interesting read nonetheless.  Happy to get any help from the comments.

Review copy courtesy of New Directions.

Back to that great beginning though.  Our narrator — a man who clearly resembles Vila-Matas himself — tells us about a trip he made to Key West, Florida, to enter a Hemingway look-alike contest:

I don’t know how many years I spent drinking and fattening myself up believing — contrary to the opinions of my wife and friends — that I was getting to look more and more like Hemingway, the idol of my youth.  Since no one even agreed with me about this and since I’m rather stubborn, I wanted to teach them all a lesson, and, having procured a false beard — which I though would increase my resemblance to Hemingway — I entered the contest this summer.

He is disgraced and comes in last; or, rather, he doesn’t place at all since he is disqualified, not in resembling Hemingway in the slightest.  The narrator is telling this story from a lectern.  This book is, in fact, a three-part lecture about irony that the narrator is presenting — well, more like rambling.  That’s not a criticism.  He is improvising:

You’ll see me improvising on occasion.  Like right now when, before going on to read my ironic revision of the two years of my youth in Paris, I feel compelled to tell you that I do know that irony plays with fire and, while mocking others, sometimes ends up mocking itself.  You all know full well what I’m talking about.  When you pretend to be in love you run the risk of feeling it, he would parodies without proper precautions ends up the victim of his own cunning.  And even if he takes them, he ends up a victim just the same.

The principle part of the narrators lecture on irony consists of his experiences in the mid-seventies living in Paris in a flat he rented from Marguerite Duras.  His fascination with Hemingway already in full swing, he lived there trying to relive the famous author’s experiences related in A Moveable Feast (from which this book gets its title): “Well, when I was fifteen years old I read his book of Paris reminiscences in one sitting and decided I’d be a hunter, fisherman, war reporter, drinker, great lover, and boxer, that is, I would be like Hemingway.”  His life, like his personages, does no such thing.  Not even his time in Paris is like the great writer’s; while Hemingway says he was poor and very happy, the narrator’s time in Paris is poor and very unhappy.  But it does stick with him.

This whole set up is fascinating.  Indeed, the whole book is fascinating as the narrator recounts an intellectual coming-of-age, encountering a variety of Paris intellectuals (one of my favorites being the one with Georges Perec).  The narrator certainly doesn’t hold himself bound by the topic of his lecture, freely going wherever his story takes him.  Indeed, the narrator hardly holds himself bound by the structure of a lecture.  The books itself, at 197 pages, has 113 sections, some more and some less related to other sections. 

Also, hopefully from the few quotations above, it’s obvious the writing is impeccable, propulsive, the translation fine as can be.  So what was my problem?  It’s totally my problem, though one I think many others will share.  Much of this book is told to other insiders.  I’m not quite there, I’m afraid.  Perhaps with some more knowledge of mid-1970s Paris and the intellects at work then this would have been more compelling to me.  I still really did enjoy this book, it just turned out it was one I could put down and not pick up again, never quite feeling a loss.  I’m glad I’ve now finished it, and I hope it finds its way to its proper readers.

Review copy courtesy of Dalkey Archive.

In Reticence, a nameless narrator, thirty-three years old, has taken a holiday to the fictional island of Sasuelo.  It’s the end of October, and he has with him his eight-month-old son.  The story he tells begins with a disturbing omen — a dead cat is floating in the harbor — but otherwise all appears to be fine as our narrator walks around the town pushing his son in a stroller.  The primary reason — if there is any reason — he went to Sasuelo was to see the Biaggis.  Perhaps some old friends.  Before he arrived, he sent them a letter, letting them know he’d be in town.  But, now that he’s in town, he just can’t seem make that visit.

To a certain extent if I’d come to Sasuelo it was to see the Biaggis.  Until now, however, held back by a mysterious apprehension, I’d always put off the moment of going to visit them and steered clear of the area around the house when I went for walks in the village.  Even on the day of my arrival, when I was still planning on going over to their place as soon as I’d got settled into the hotel, I’d stayed in my room all afternoon.  Two days had now gone by since then and I was starting to wonder at the fact that I hadn’t yet bumped into them in the village, even if I’d been careful to avoid their house every time I went out. 

He does venture to the house eventually, but upon arrival he again felt some strange reticence and simply stood outside.  He checked their mailbox and found that his letter had just been delivered.  A way to keep his presence unknown, then, he takes back his letter along with a few of the others and leaves. 

It’s about that time that we readers sense that something is not right here.  After all, some of the narrator’s trips around the village, to the docks, and to the Biaggis’ are at night, and he leaves his son at the hotel.  And just who are the Biaggis, and why does our narrator, who seemed to feel just fine visiting them, begin to feel apprehension at the thought of seeing them? 

But Reticence gets more and more strange when, without any foundation, our narrator is convinced the Biaggis (or at least Paul Biaggi) are on to him, spying on him, even staying at the same hotel, the better to keep an eye on him:

Four tables had been occupied, which intrigued me because it seemed to me that there hadn’t been so many guests on other days.  Could it be that someone who didn’t normally eat breakfast in the dining room came down today for the first time?  Could it be that Biaggi – because I immediately thought of Biaggi – had come down to have breakfast in the dining room this morning?  But if it was Biaggi, I thought, why had he come down precisely today for the first time?  Why, if he was at the hotel, didn’t he have his breakfast brought up to his room as he must have done on the other days?  Was he now indifferent to whether or not I knew he was staying at the hotel, or had he realized I’d cottoned on and given up trying to hide altogether?

Our narrator becomes more and more convinced something is amiss, that Biaggi, whom we haven’t seen, is getting closer and closer to him — again, though, why does this matter if he himself was planning on visiting the Biaggis on the first day he arrived at Sasuelo? 

It’s a story filled with questions as the tension constantly builds.  We readers know that the narrator is being irrational, but we go along with him (what else can we do — we know so little), suspecting something is amis but without any foundation.  His paranoia becomes the hook that pulls us along.  We see him begin a paragraph wondering if Biaggi was somewhere and end it with certainty, and we keep going, even sometimes forgetting ourselves that this narrator must be slightly unhinged, and here he is with an infant.  Speaking of which, where is the mother?

If this sounds fun and interesting, I promise it is, but I must also proffer a warning: this is a book about atmosphere and paranoia, not about answers.  I loved it.  I was certainly worried for the narrator, but not for the reasons the narrator would hope.  Then again, there are moments when the narrator seems to know what’s going on, and then he just keeps walking.

So, not knowing much about Toussaint going in, this book was certainly enough to build up my appetite.  I now have another author I need to catch up with.