• print • Apr/May 2009

    Pilgrims’ Progress

    Laish by Aharon Appelfeld • William Giraldi

    The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld can muster no patience for those critics who insist on dubbing him a Holocaust writer. In his harrowing memoir, The Story of a Life (2004), he admits “there is nothing more annoying” than that characterization for a Jewish novelist who survived the camps. J. M. Coetzee has this to say:

    When Aharon Appelfeld began writing in the early 1960s, the Holocaust did not count, in Israel, as a fitting subject for fiction. . . . Insofar as Israel was a new beginning, the Holocaust could have

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    Our Better Nature

    A new verse translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura elegantly counters the superstitions of this modern age. • Paul Grimstad

    At a moment in history when God is said to participate in world politics, the pungent ode to nature De rerum natura, composed by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, can provide a dose of sanity. What the atomist Epicurus called ataraxia—the tranquility of mind achieved when one is freed from the fear of occult controllers—Lucretius transformed into a prophetic materialism. His lyric treatise, published in the first century bce, predicts everything from atomic physics to the existence of DNA and casts it all in melodious hexameters.

    Unlike the many prose versions of De rerum natura, David

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    Rider on the Storm

    Frederick Barthelme’s sad-sack hero survived Hurricane Katrina, barely • Eric Banks

    Waveland is not a place you would want to find yourself. According to adopted son Frederick Barthelme, even before Hurricane Katrina roared over the Mississippi Sound—“a muddy sump you could walk straight out into for a mile and the water wouldn’t rise much above your ankles”—and made a beeline for the hamlet, Waveland was no “beachfront town; it was more like ten miles of down-on-its-luck trailer park. After the storm it was ten miles of debris, snapped phone poles, shredded sheets in the trees.” There isn’t any narrative of redemption and rebuilding here, no rising from the flames: “There

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    Culture Crash

    Gary Indiana’s carnivalesque novel is both hallucinatory and riotous • James Gibbons

    Gary Indiana likes rummaging through the wreckage. He regularly signals as much: Recent essays were gathered last year in a collection titled Utopia’s Debris, and his 2003 novel, Do Everything in the Dark, opens with a section called “The Debris Field.” Later in that book, he coins an aperçu that encapsulates an entire philosophy: “Wherever people attempt life, debris piles up.” The emphasis on detritus suggests that everyone and everything has washed up as flotsam and jetsam on history’s far shore; vital unities are denied us, and we can only gaze back at those of the past. At best, “by

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    Exile Returned

    Agha Shahid Ali’s poems are charmed whispers that can console and devastate • Joseph Donahue

    Arriving in the United States from India in 1975, Kashmiri author Agha Shahid Ali pursued both graduate degrees and his art. While quickly successful in the world of writing programs and academic presses, he explored in his poetry how readily expatriation could come to feel like exile. But as his collected poems, The Veiled Suite, make clear, he worked hard to find in such exile if not his true home, at least a safe house, as in book after book until his untimely death in 2001 he measured the distance between East and West.

    Admittedly, this distance has been closing for a while. From the

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    Moroccan Bound

    Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun • John Freeman

    There is very little under the sun one can tell a Moroccan about sex if, as is likely, he or she has been exposed to an uncensored edition of The Thousand Nights and One Night. The fabled collection is full of forced coupling and pimps, swords used for erotic purposes, “kisses, bitings, huggings, twistings, great strokes of the zabb, variations, first, second, and third positions, and the rest.” It’s not just a carnal cornucopia; sex is the great nexus for jealousy, longing, and love. Sex, in these tales, is about power.

    For the past thirty years, Tahar Ben Jelloun has managed to bring such

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    The Sound Mirror

    The Sound Mirror by Andrew Joron • Noah Eli Gordon

    Andrew Joron is a modern-day alchemist. He’s not interested in solipsistic self-enrichment; rather, he practices the art of transformation. Translator of Marxist-utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (1998) and author of a study titled Neo-Surrealism; Or, The Sun at Night (2004) and the volume of essays and prose poems The Cry at Zero (2007), as well as a handful of poetry collections, including the remarkable Fathom (2003), Joron has always been a thinker in multiple genres. Though aligned with the revolutionary impulse behind Surrealism—the conjuring of paradox to expand the

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    In the United States of Africa

    In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi • Matthew Ladd

    To name your book In the United States of Africa, and to present readers with a vision of the world turned completely on its head, in which the urbane citizens of Rwanda, Nigeria, and the eastern Cape are given to fretting over a chronic glut of working-class immigrants from the war-torn and disease-ridden hamlets of Europe and North America, is to suggest a project barely containable in this volume’s hundred-odd pages. There’s too much history to reshape, too many explanations to offer.

    Thankfully, Djiboutian novelist Abdourahman A. Waberi isn’t much interested in offering explanations. The

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  • print • Apr/May 2009

    Liberal Mediation

    Versed by Rae Armantrout • Tim Griffin

    Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. Yet these meditations are often counterintuitive and sometimes downright absurd in their complexion, referencing cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote and Rainbow Frog), miming the standardized phrases of tabloid headlines and business transactions (“These temporary credits / will no longer be reflected / in your next billing period”), and rehearsing bits of dialogue rooted only in the

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2009

    Lowboy

    Lowboy by John Wray • Stacey Levine

    Will Heller is a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic experiencing a mental break. During the course of a day, Will, nicknamed Lowboy, moves through the underground sprawl of Manhattan’s subways, occasionally surfacing. As he likewise dips into and out of psychosis, he reasons, through the screaming overload of his thoughts, that losing his virginity will “cool the world,” saving it from the destruction of climate change, for “the world’s inside of me . . . just like I am inside the world.” Through the logic of his crushing illness, Will is trying to save himself.

    Lowboy, John Wray’s third

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2009

    Crazy Guise

    Out of My Skin by John Haskell • Mark Sarvas

    Recently on NPR, Philip Seymour Hoffman gave an interview that was surprising in its awkward, fumbling banality. For example, on the difference between theater and film actors, he offered, “I’m sitting here and [theater actors are] doing it in front of me, but the only difference is that they’re doing it and I’m watching, but ultimately we’re all people hanging out in the same building.” Yet the taut intelligence of Hoffman’s performances can scarcely be gainsaid; like the work of many post-Strasberg stars, his oeuvre is a testament to an instinctive, emotional intelligence, which is not,

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  • print • Feb/Mar 2009

    In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

    In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin • Amy Rosenberg

    The final scene in The Grapes of Wrath is unforgettable: Rose of Sharon nursing a starving old man after the birth of her stillborn baby. And in the face of headlines daily declaring the worst economic collapse since the Depression, Steinbeck is worth remembering. It’s unexpected, though, to encounter echoes of his work in tales set as far from California as rural Pakistan. But Daniyal Mueenuddin, a half-American, half-Pakistani writer, has crafted a chronicle of poverty as detailed and revealing as any by Steinbeck, with the same drive to humanize his subjects. Mueenuddin’s collection of linked

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