A Review of Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke (translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter)

Dream of Ding Village

4 out of 5: In Yan Lianke’s novel, Dream of Ding Village, a remote, agricultural village in China suffers from an AIDS epidemic. Ten years ago, the inhabitants of Ding Village sold their blood to blood collectors to increase their wealth and improve their standard of living. While the blood sales allowed the villagers to replace their traditional mud and thatch huts with two-story houses made of brick and tile, the unclean blood collection practices infected many villagers with AIDS. This novel’s disturbing premise is based on the true story of the 1990s AIDS scandal in Henan Province.

The novel is narrated from the grave by the murdered son of Ding Village’s primary blood collector. The dead boy describes the slow and painful deaths of the AIDS-infected villagers, as well as the actions taken by the villagers in response to the calamity. Some attempt to profit from the tragedy (stealing from the sick or selling coffins, for example) while others seek to alleviate the pain of the sufferers or to bring hope to the dying. Lianke’s prose embodies a sing-song, repetitive quality reminiscent of an oral storytelling tradition, and the plight of the dying villagers is reflected and magnified by the parallel destruction of the village’s land, which suffers from drought and neglect.

Dream of Ding Village occasionally loses focus and, near the end, approaches absurdity with a complicated subplot about arranged marriages between dead people. While a tighter narrative would have increased this novel’s power, Dream of Ding Village remains a compelling portrayal of humanity’s ever-present potential for self-destruction.

A Review of The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich

The Lake

3.5 out of 5: The Lake, the latest novel by well-known Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto, is an enigmatic love story told from the first-person perspective of Chihiro, a muralist and “going on thirty” daughter of unmarried parents. Chihiro’s unconventional childhood and the recent death of her mother contribute to her sense of isolation and unrest, and she spends hours staring out of the window of her Tokyo apartment. Eventually she notices a man (Nakajima) across the street engaged in the same activity, and they forge a window-to-window relationship made up of shy glances, waves, and smiles. As the connection grows, the couple spends increasing amounts of time together in Chihiro’s apartment, and Chihiro learns Nakajima is haunted by a terrible past experience. Ultimately, Chihiro must decide whether to commit to a relationship with the mysterious and damaged Nakajima.

In her typically compact style, Yoshimoto creates a relationship of ever-increasing power with minimal words. The conversational casualness of the prose keeps the story rocketing along. While the overall effect is potent, the story is marred by too many clichés (“sleep like a log,” “bored me to death”). It’s difficult to know whether such imperfections arise out of the translation or from a conscious choice by Yoshimoto to give Chihiro a naïve and relatively uneducated voice, but, either way, the resulting prose is often uninspiring. Nevertheless, The Lake is a unique love story and a quick, entertaining read.

A Review of Beautiful & Pointless by David Orr

Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry

In honor of Poetry Month (April), here’s another piece on poetry:

Despite its subtitle, Beautiful & Pointless is not really a “guide” to modern poetry. I would call it more of a meditation. Orr, the poetry critic for the New York Times Book Review, doesn’t really explain the various poetic forms or the different methods for deconstructing and understanding a poem. He doesn’t give any helpful tips to the beginner for how to read and appreciate poetry. Instead, Orr describes his task as “try[ing] to give you a sense of what modern poets think about, how those poets talk about what they're thinking about, and most important, how an individual poetry reader relates to the art he usually likes, always loves, and is frequently annoyed by.”

Using many examples of contemporary poetry, Orr discusses how poets inject the personal into their poetry (and, just as importantly, how some poets avoid the personal altogether) and how poets address and respond to current politics through poetry. There’s a chapter on form, but its main point seems to be that contemporary poets feel free to bend the rules of form. Two chapters (titled “ambition” and “the fishbowl”) discuss the inner workings of the poetry world, from the aspirations of contemporary poets to their reactions to each other to the difficulty in getting poetry published these days, much less read. A regular reader of poetry will find much of interest in Beautiful & Pointless and is likely to discover even more reasons to love poetry. For the poetry novice, however, this book is not the best choice of a guide as it assumes a certain, not insignificant level of prior knowledge and appreciation. In the book’s last chapter, Orr attempts to identify what makes poetry (both in the writing and reading) worthwhile. He dismisses the predominant views (i.e. poetry’s special connection to language, to ourselves, or to our society/culture and concludes that “[p]oetry is a small, vulnerable human activity no better or more powerful than thousands of other small, vulnerable human activities” such as gardening or movie watching. In the end, Orr believes we read poetry simply because we love it: it “seems beautifully pointless, or pointlessly beautiful.”

Lodgings by Andrzej Sosnowski (translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff)

Lodgings: Selected Poems 1987-2010

I'm certainly not qualified to review poetry, so this isn't a review, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to tell you about Lodgings, the latest book published by Open Letter (one of my absolute favorite publishers). We are very lucky to get this opportunity to read Andrezej Sosnowski’s poetry in English. Lodgings in the first book-length collection of Sosnowski’s poetry to be translated into English from the Polish, and translator Benjamin Paloff has done a marvelous job capturing Sosnowski’s dream-like imagery and contrasting tones. This collection includes poems from nine of Sosnowski’s books, spanning more than twenty years of work (1987-2010).

Although I’m not an educated poetry critic, I am a longtime poetry appreciator. I know what I like, and Sosnowski’s poetry definitely qualifies. It’s challenging and often nonsensical on the first reading, but the lush imagery leaves me in a pleasant, rather than an annoying, fog of confusion. In each poem, I usually discover a line or two that really grabs my attention and encourages me to read the poem several times over so as to untangle its meaning. Meaning often shifts from line to line. These poems demand an open-minded and flexible reader.

To give you a sense of Sosnowski’s style (and Paloff’s translation), here are a couple of my favorite lines from two of the poems included in Lodgings.

From “Warsaw”:

Yesterday, after the paper, they were giving out a new hymn, actually /

a two-for-one mazurka and dream cake in chocolate sauce /

garnished with candied angelica, and today on the stairs and in the elevator /

the smell of mint chewing gum so that once again like the speech /

bubble in a comic strip it’s going to follow me all day.

From “Life in Korea”:

The intellect dozes a little, /

the senses have their turn, and again I’m seized /

by the lovely things of this world: apples, water, milk, /

purest air. And once you get it, /

that you haven’t earned these or any other /

fifteen minutes, you can have a drink, /

smash your world to pieces, and at long last /

think it over.

A Review of Open City by Teju Cole

Open City: A Novel

4 out of 5: From the very first paragraph, Teju Cole’s debut novel Open City announces itself as the tale of a wanderer:

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. … These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.

As Julius, a Nigerian immigrant, meanders around Manhattan (and also around Brussels during a vacation trip), he ruminates on an astonishing array of topics. Chapter One touches on bird migrations, classical music radio programs, the art of listening, memory and the practice of memorizing, the failure of Tower Records and Blockbuster, and the recent death of a neighbor's wife. And that’s just the first chapter. Julius transitions from subject to subject effortlessly, if a bit randomly, reflecting on serious subjects as well as lighter ones. Like a cafe conversation with an intelligent and educated friend, nothing much happens in Open City and yet the book is never boring.

Julius’s sense of isolation permeates his thoughts, creating a somber tone for the novel, which is further compounded by recent events including the September 11th terrorist attacks and Julius’s breakup with his girlfriend. Residents and frequent visitors to New York City will recognize Julius’s path through that great city’s distinct neighborhoods, which he meticulously describes with street names, subway stops, and notable landmarks. Those without much experience or interest in the city may be bored by the specificity, but it’s easy enough to skim past these details. Overall, Open City is a thought-provoking meditation on the important (and some of the not so important) issues we all confront in contemporary America and Europe.

A Review of Solo by Rana Dasgupta

Solo

4 out of 5: Solo by Rana Dasgupta is a diptych of a novel composed of two related but independent halves. In the first half, a blind, 100-year-old Bulgarian man named Ulrich reminiscences about his life from the vantage point of his squalid apartment overlooking a train station in Sofia, the Bulgarian town in which Ulrich spent the vast majority of his life. Though graphically limited, Ulrich’s life touches many of the important moments in modern history, beginning with the last years of the Ottoman Empire and continuing through both World Wars, the Nazi and Russian occupations, post-war Communism, and eventually up to contemporary, independent Bulgaria.

Ulrich’s imaginative life is just as vivid as his actual life, and the second half of Solo is made up of Ulrich’s daydreams. Beginning as a series of distinct stories and characters, Ulrich’s daydreams become gradually more intricate and interrelated. Ulrich’s imaginative “children” include a young, ambitious Georgian woman and her shiftless brother, a Bulgarian musical prodigy, and an American executive of a record company. Their stories converge in contemporary New York City, where Ulrich inserts himself as a character in his own daydreams. In lush prose, Solo confronts the consequences of abandoned dreams and explores the relationship between life as it is lived in reality and as it unfolds in the imagination. Many of Ulrich’s creations stretch credulity (How does an elderly, blind Bulgarian man know about the internal politics at an American record company?), but these flights of fancy don’t detract from the overall effect. Ultimately, Solo suggests the life of the mind can be just as soul-sustaining as the life of day-to-day reality:

Thinking back, [Ulrich] is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavor of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.

Do I Like Every Book I Read?

Some of you have noticed that the vast majority of my recent reviews have been favorable. Have I gone soft? No. I've just decided that, with the limited time I have, I'm not particularly interested in taking the time to write reviews for books I don't like. Although my reviews are generally short, each one takes at least an hour to write and most take several hours. I've got a substantial list of books I've read recently that I would rate no better than a 3.5 out of 5 (some would be 1/5 or 2/5). I keep meaning to write up a few of those reviews to mix in with my more favorable reviews, but since that task is so much less pleasant than writing a positive review of a book I'm excited to tell you about, I never seem to get around to it. For every review posted here at Literary License, there's at least one review (and often more) that never gets written. So, rest assured, I haven't lost my objectivity. I've just lost the motivation to tell you about books I don't like.

A Review of Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger (translated by Ross Benjamin)

Funeral for a Dog: A Novel

4.5 out of 5: Thomas Pletzinger’s imaginative novel, Funeral for a Dog, proceeds on two parallel planes. One plane is inhabited by the present-day diary entries of German journalist/ethnographer Daniel Mandelkern recording a brief visit to the Italian lakeside home of reclusive children’s book author Dirk Svensson. The other plane consists of Svensson’s previously-written memoir about his travels through New York City at the time of the September 11th terrorist attacks and through remote regions of Brazil. As Mandelkern attempts to draw enough material out of Svensson for a 3000-word profile piece, he gradually loses hold over his original purpose and, further encouraged by his discovery of Svensson’s memoir in a locked suitcase, perseverates on his own personal crisis:

I’m lying between books and people, between words and bodies. My language is of
no use for decisions, each word is only true for a few seconds, then it dries and turns to paper …. Svensson has decided on things: he lives in a ruin, now he chops the old wood, he jumps in the clear, reliable water. Is that how one should live (is that how I should live)?

Funeral for a Dog is many things. It’s a novel about parallel searches for identity and meaning, a recording of the events of a five-day house party, a mystery about the death of a friend, and a chronicle of the slow decline of an elderly, three-legged dog. Scenes peppered with the funhouse imagery of carousels, roller coasters, and cotton candy alternate with those filled with dark foreboding.

In Funeral for a Dog, Pletzinger delivers a challenging and innovative novel that asks more questions than it answers as it wallows in the kind of directionless seeking that has become a hallmark of postmodern fiction. This puzzle of a novel is filled with echoes, repetitions, and reflections, which are carefully preserved by Benjamin’s adept translation. In a Mobius-worthy trick, the last page of the novel loops right back to the first page. Rather than leading towards clarity, Funeral for a Dog proves clarity is an illusion. This high-energy read will frustrate some readers, but those willing to commit to the journey will be rewarded with an intelligent and creative portrayal of the intermingling of love and loss, life and death.

A Review of Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk (translated by Michiel Heyns)

Agaat

5 out of 5: At the beginning of this epic novel, seventy-year-old Milla de Wet is confined to her bed. Once the strong and competent owner of a successful farm inherited from her mother, Milla suffers from A.L.S. and now is left with only the ability to blink her eyes and, after a while, not even that. Milla is entirely dependent on the ministrations of Agaat, her devoted house servant, who wordlessly promises Milla “the best-managed death in history.” It is 1996 in South Africa, just two years after the demise of apartheid.

From this confined vantage point, Milla narrates her adult life story, beginning with her troubled marriage to the dashing, if agriculturally-challenged, Jak de Wet in 1947. Soon after she and Jak settle on her farm, Milla decides to take in and raise the abused young daughter of a farm laborer, renaming the girl Agaat. Long unable to have a child of her own, Milla eventually gives birth to a son named Jakkie, marginalizing Agaat’s position in the family. Over time, Milla and Agaat develop a complex co-dependency, as do Jakkie and Agaat, while Jak becomes jealous of Agaat’s hold over both his wife and his son. Agaat forms the center of a decades-long, multi-dimensional game of tug-o-war: “a pivot she was, a kingpin, you’d felt for a while now how the parts gyrated around her, faster and faster, even though she was the least.”

Agaat is about many things, including marriage, parenting, friendship, sickness, and death. Politically-minded readers will find plenty of support for interpreting the novel as an allegory for apartheid, while those with more domestic interests will appreciate the details on embroidery, ecologically-sensitive farming practices, and home-based nursing procedures. Perhaps Agaat’s most important lesson concerns the importance of communication to achieving lasting change. The best education and carefully constructed systems cannot bridge the gap between master and servant, between white and black. Rather, true understanding is possible only after years of empathetic communication. As Milla nears death, she and Agaat have finally approached this kind of understanding:

[The doctor’s] face looms above mine. He looks at my eyes as if they were the eyes of an octopus, as if he’s not quite sure where an octopus’s eyes are located, as if he doesn’t know what an octopus sees. He shines a little light into my face, he swings it from side to side. I look at him hard, but seeing, he cannot see.

Agaat catches my eye. Wait, let me see, she says.

[The doctor] stands aside. He shakes his head.

Agaat’s face is above me, her cap shines white, she looks into my eyes. I blink them for her so that she can see what I think. The effrontery! They think that if you don’t stride around on your two legs and make small talk about the weather, then you’re a muscle mass with reflexes and they come and flash lights in your face. Tell the man he must clear out.

A small flicker ripples across Agtaat’s face. Ho now hopalong! it means. Her apron creaks as she straightens up. Her translation is impeccable.

She says thank you doctor. She says doctor is welcome to leave now, she’s feeling better. She says thank you for the help, thank you for the oxygen, we can carry on here by ourselves again now.

I close my eyes. He must think she’s crazy.

Again the fingers snapping in front of my face.

She’s conscious, really, doctor, you can leave her alone now, she’s just tired, when she shuts her eyes like that then I know. Everything’s in order, she says, she just wants to sleep now. I know, I know her ways.

Milla’s disease has the potential to reduce this nearly 600-page novel into an exercise in claustrophobia, but, instead, Van Niekerk has created a work of stunning breadth and emotional potency. Milla’s second-person narration is liberally broken up by her diary entries, which Agaat has decided to read to Milla during her last days, and by italicized paragraphs of Milla’s stream-of-consciousness musings. Van Niekerk is a poet as well as a novelist, and her considerable poetic abilities are on display throughout the novel. Likewise, Michiel Heyns’s masterful work yields an English translation with all the elegant power of the original language. These various elements come together in Agaat to create an unforgettable reading experience that transcends the lives of its four primary characters to implicate the broader world.

This review also appears at Three Percent in a slightly different form. Agaat is longlisted for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), and my review is part of the "Why This Book Should Win the BTBA" series at Three Percent, which covers each of the twenty-five longlisted titles.

2011 Best Translated Book Award

The Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) was founded in 2007 for the purpose of recognizing the very best international works of fiction and poetry published in original English translations (i.e. not retranslations or reprints). The shortlist for this year's award will be announced on March 24th. Go here to see the list of the twenty-five titles on the longlist for this year's award, which covers books published between Dec. 1, 2009 and Nov. 30, 2010.

Much of my reading each year focuses on works in translation, so I have been an avid follower of the BTBA since it's founding. I am thrilled to have the honor of serving on the panel of fiction judges for next year's BTBA, covering books published between Dec. 1, 2010 and Nov. 30, 2011. This means I'll be posting lots of reviews of translated books here at Literary License over the next year. Also, if you come across a new translation you think deserves to be considered for the BTBA, please leave me a comment or send me an e-mail.

A Review of On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui (translated by Idra Novey)

On Elegance While Sleeping

4 out of 5: Emilio Lascano Tegui (1887-1966) was, at various times during his eventful life, an Argentinean, a Parisian, a self-labeled viscount, a translator, a journalist, a curator, a painter, a decorator, a diplomat, a mechanic, an orator, a dentist, and, fortunately for us, a writer. Tegui’s 1925 novel On Elegance While Sleeping, a cult classic in Argentina, Tegui’s home country, is now available for the first time to an English-speaking audience (thanks to Dalkey Archive Press and translator Idra Novey). This genre-defying novel is framed as a four-year series of chronologically-ordered diary entries composed by an unnamed French infantryman in the late 1800s. Like its author, this novel’s narrator concerns himself with a bit of everything, including the proverbial kitchen sink (or, should I say, the cultivation of carrots). The entries touch on the themes of life, illness (specifically, syphilis), death, sex, gender, memory, crime, and literature, to name just a few. Seamlessly shifting among present reflections, past recollections, and stories within stories, the entries examine the mundane (one begins “Cotton mittens bother me when they’re dyed black.”) as well as the sublime (“Nothing spreads sadness like popularity.”) and range in length from just two sentences to almost seven pages. The result is a work of art that’s impossible to categorize. Is it autobiography? Allegory? A crime novel? An experiment in form? In a word, yes.

Just before we lose our bearings wandering among this heady collection of seemingly aimless thoughts—that is, at the perfect moment—On Elegance While Sleeping changes registers. The novel adopts a foreboding tone as the diary entries slowly coalesce into the thoughts of a man intent on committing murder. Driven by a Raskolnikov-like need “[t]o unburden humanity of an imperfect being: a weakness,” the diarist lays out his motivations in chilling and poetic prose:

I’ve sketched out my plans and am ready. I have a new strength in me, taken from the secret core of my life, driving me on, controlling me. It’s health, youth, and optimism combined. Until yesterday, my tentative novel (“The Syphilis of Don Juan”) served as a haven for my imagination. Today, it doesn’t satisfy my thirst—or, better said, can no longer stem the anguish that gnaws at me on the eve of an act that is now quite inevitable. I’m halfway between a comedy and a strange sort of drama, and feel an overbearing need to lower the curtain. No simple curtain: the front curtain of the stage, the grand drape, the great iron and asbestos curtain that drops like a zinc plate from the sixth floor and creaks as it falls. Something like that, flamboyant, coarse, unexpected—something that will impose its tyranny over my life without question. I’m going to kill someone.

Tegui’s prose is a seductive mix of hard edges and soft contours, flowing musings and sharp declarations. Translator Idra Novey maintains this delicate balance, juxtaposing “a haven for my imagination” with “the anguish that gnaws” and following a complex and elegant three-sentence metaphor with the startling declaration, “I’m going to kill someone.” Tegui’s compelling style relies as much on rhythm and sound as it does on content, and Novey masterfully recreates this effect in English.

At its core, On Elegance While Sleeping gives us access to the soul of a man who is desperately seeking. Whether it’s love, sex, happiness, connection with his fellow man, an imaginative outlet, or simply a good story, the problem is the same: to find what he lacks. He asks, “Could it be that the thing I’m missing is courage?” Does our diarist have the fortitude to follow through with his murderous plan? To discover the answer, you’ll have to read the book.

This review also appears at Three Percent in a slightly different form. On Elegance While Sleeping is longlisted for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA), and my review is part of the "Why This Book Should Win the BTBA" series at Three Percent, which covers each of the twenty-five longlisted titles.

A Review of Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Skippy Dies: A Novel

4 out of 5: As might be guessed from its title, one of the primary characters (14-year-old Skippy) dies within this novel’s first few pages. After that unexpected death, which interrupts a doughnut-eating contest between roommates, the narrative jumps backwards in time to cover the events leading up to that fateful event. Along the way, Skippy Dies touches on every imaginable component of adolescent life in the context of a group of young students at Seabrook, a prestigious, all-male Catholic preparatory school located in contemporary Dublin, Ireland. Drugs, alcohol, cliques, girls, sports, video games and cell phones, depression and existential angst, friends and enemies, and even attempted travel through time and space all play a part in this sprawling, messy narrative.

In telling this complex story, Murray skillfully shifts between numerous points of view, including that of both students and teachers, to create a multi-dimensional world in all its disarray. Coming in at well over 600 pages, Skippy Dies is too often weighed down by long expositions—including detailed descriptions of the concepts of m-theory physics and the origins of Irish sidhe (ancient burial mounds)—and tedious descriptions of the boys’ video game and role playing sessions. Perhaps Murray intends for these elements to illustrate the non-linear, rambling adolescent mind, but their effect is to slow down the narrative, which otherwise moves along at a brisk, entertaining clip.

Murray has a great talent for concise and evocative character descriptions like this one of Father Green, one of the most senior teachers at Seabrook: “Rail-thin, a head taller than the tallest of the boys, on his best days the priest looks like the end of the world; his presence itself is like smoldering kindling, or knuckles cracking over and over.” Skippy Dies is liberally sprinkled with such imaginative prose without being overburdened with flourishes. Similarly, in telling the stories of the Seabrook boys and their teachers, Murray masterfully balances the narrative in the space between seriousness and humor, repulsiveness and charm, and despair and hope. Overall, Skippy Dies is an insightful and engaging, if over-long, examination of the adolescent condition.

A Review of You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

You Know When the Men Are Gone

4 out of 5: Siobhan Fallon lived on the army base in Fort Hood, Texas while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty, and it is this fertile setting that gives rise to Fallon’s recently published collection of stories You Know When the Men Are Gone. Although a couple stories unfold within sight of the front lines, the most successful ones take place on the base, where Fallon’s personal experience yields a richly detailed world about which we civilians know very little.

Fallon’s plain prose is well-suited to her context, never overshadowing the raw emotions experienced by her characters. Her simple images underscore the gravity of a country at war:

No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and, best of all, no more front doors slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts to the windows above to throw down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.

Most of these stories focus on this “muted life” lived by the women left behind on base after their husbands are shipped overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan. Without calling into question the enormous respect and honor owed to these soldiers, Fallon doesn’t shy away from the unpleasant aspects of a country at war: the post traumatic stress disorder and other injuries suffered by soldiers, the abuse of alcohol and drugs, the potential for domestic violence and adultery, and the specter of war widowhood.

You Know When the Men Are Gone opens a window into a foreign world that’s hiding within ordinary communities scattered across the United States. This is a world we dutifully honor from afar but neglect to examine closely. Fallon’s stories make us suspect we’re not doing enough, not sacrificing enough, for our country. As such, they are challenging and well worth reading.

A Review of The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder

The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World

4 out of 5: The Philosophical Breakfast Club is a comprehensive history of the beginnings of modern science told from the alternating perspectives of four Cambridge students. In the early 1800s, William Whewell, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones met at Cambridge and instituted regular discussions over breakfast where they committed to work for scientific progress and the greater public recognition of scientists. During the momentous lifetimes of these four men, a man of science went from “a country parson collecting beetles in his spare hours” to “a member of a professional class … pursuing a common activity within a certain institutional framework ….”

The Philosophical Breakfast Club covers, in great detail, Babbage’s invention of the first computer, Herschel’s book introducing Francis Bacon’s scientific method to the general public, Whewell’s universal theory of tides, Jones’s economic theories, and many other important scientific breakthroughs. The chapter describing Herschel’s 4-year stint in the Cape Colony of southern Africa mapping the stars of the southern hemisphere is a particularly nice set piece. Snyder’s clear, simple prose brings complex topics within reach of a lay audience, but the book occasionally gives more detail than the non-scientific reader will have patience for. Overall, The Philosophical Breakfast Club is an engaging and accessible history of modern science.

Happy Valentine's Day!

As you can see from my below post, I really enjoyed Herve Le Tellier's novel Enough About Love. If you're curious about Le Tellier's writing but not quite willing to commit to a full-length novel, try reading a novella instead. Other Press generously shared this link with me to Le Tellier's novella The Intervention of a Good Man, and I'm passing it on to you. Consider it a Valentine's Day gift. You can print the story or read it online.

A Review of Enough about Love by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter)

Enough About Love

4.5 out of 5: In true Oulipo fashion, Hervé Le Tellier’s latest novel, Enough About Love, is a constraint-filled endeavor. With a structure inspired by a game of Abkhazian dominoes, Le Tellier’s six protagonists combine and recombine in every possible two-person configuration in short chapters titled according to their major players (e.g., Yves and Anna, Thomas and Louise). The chapters follow quickly upon one another and, as they are often dominated by dialog, give the flavor of a dramatic performance rather than a traditional novel. Indeed, Enough about Love would make for a very entertaining play, and Le Tellier’s self-imposed constraints never get in the way of the story.

The novel’s main action consists of two overlapping love triangles involving two married couples and two single men, all middle-aged. The constantly morphing relationships illustrate various forms of love, including married love, adulterous love, and jealous love. The overall effect is kaleidoscopic, the characters’ ever-shifting emotions and interactions slide against each other to reveal different shades and nuances. Enough About Love’s complex structure supports and enhances its story, and Adriana Hunter’s adept English translation delivers all the playfulness and complexity of the original.

Within the novel’s larger framework, Le Tellier cleverly embeds a couple stand-out set pieces. One is a public reading by Yves of an essay he wrote on “foreignness” juxtaposed in two-column format with a running internal monologue by Yves’s lover’s husband, who’s decided to attend the reading in an act of curiosity or martyrdom or both. The second set piece is a book written by Yves’s for his lover Anna composed of forty of Yves’s most significant memories of Anna. In an audacious move, Le Tellier includes Yves’s entire book (all 25 pages of it) within this novel. The result is a stunningly intimate portrayal of love, leaving the reader feeling like a voyeur who stumbled upon an open bedroom window, uncomfortable and thrilled at the same time.

The two female protagonists, Anna and Louise, share too many similarities, including fashion tastes, high-powered careers, and dominant personalities. More contrast would have been welcome in these characters, but this is a small complaint in a book filled with so many wonders. Highly recommended.

A Review of The Marriage Artist by Andrew Winer

The Marriage Artist: A Novel

4 out of 5: The Marriage Artist, Andrew Winer’s latest novel, weaves together two love stories, one contemporary and one historical. As Daniel Lichtmann, a modern-day art critic, seeks the truth behind his wife’s recent suicide, he discovers a back story that originates in Vienna before World War II and continues through the Holocaust. Winer’s portrayal of love and marriage in difficult circumstances is nuanced and intelligent. The Marriage Artist avoids syrupy, sentimental romances in favor of complicated, and often doomed, relationships that reflect the idiosyncrasies of their participants: “[W] hen we love we are not really looking to see something new, but rather our own ideas embodied in the other person—qualities that awaken echoes already resounding in us.” This finding of ourselves within those we love is an important concept explored by The Marriage Artist.

Along with love, art is a recurring motif across the decades of this novel, beginning with the beautiful illuminated marriage contracts made by Josef Pick, a Jewish artist in Vienna, and continuing up to the dramatic final sculptures of contemporary artist Benjamin Wind. Eventually, this novel’s present and past love stories converge in a devastating conclusion. Overall, The Marriage Artist is a sensitive rumination on the complex nature of love and marriage.

A Review of Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

Foreign Bodies
4 out of 5: Cynthia Ozick’s latest novel, Foreign Bodies, is a reworking of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Middle-aged, unmarried Bea is sent to Paris by her volatile brother Marvin to rescue Marvin’s son from a life of dissipation and from the clutches of an older woman. The story unfolds in the year 1952 through a combination of letters and shifting narrative perspectives. Even a charlatan doctor, the temporary lover of Marvin’s daughter, gets a turn as the protagonist. Ozick’s prose is complex and poetic; it’s infused with a rhythmic musicality that, while striking, sometimes loses its meaning: “Grief is nightmare, grief is gargoyle: the shock of fresh bereavement must be stirring up such grotesqueries of criminality.”

Like a Gothic cathedral, Foreign Bodies is a beautifully intricate construction, filled with endless nooks and crannies that repeatedly echo the more general motifs. The ever-shifting perspective, while masterfully executed, does not linger on any character long enough to engage the reader. The resulting emotional distance results in an admirable book that’s not likely to inspire a deep emotional response.

A Review of Where We Know: New Orleans As Home

Where We Know: New Orleans As Home
4 out of 5: This anthology, edited by David Rutledge and titled Where We Know: New Orleans as Home, collects essays and two short stories about the city of New Orleans. Most essays are contemporary and focus on the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but a handful are historical, including essays by Barbara Bodichon and Dudley Warner, first published in 1867 and 1887, respectively.

As New Orleans rebuilds after Hurricane Katrina, some stay in the city, some return to the city, and some decide to leave the city forever. Where We Know captures all these various voices and reveals the diverse emotions surrounding this culturally complex American city. Essayist Anne Gisleson notes about post-Katrina New Orleans that “the city is alive in a new sort of way … [with] a sense of hope, opportunity and purpose I never felt growing up here.”

As I’ve come to expect from Chin Music Press, Where We Know is gorgeously designed. The book’s front and end papers reproduce full-color sections of old maps of New Orleans. Quotes about the city from its famous citizens and visitors—dating from 1721 to 2009—are interspersed throughout. A map in the front of the book pinpoints the exact locations in the city that form the settings of the book’s essays and stories, and a few essays are even accompanied by color photographs. Thanks to this thoughtful design, Where We Know is as rewarding to look at and to hold as it is to read.

A Review of By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

By Nightfall: A Novel
4 out of 5: In By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham’s sixth novel, Peter and Rebecca Harris have a comfortable, if complacent, marriage. Peter runs a mildly successful art gallery, and Rebecca works for a soon-to-be sold art magazine. In a textbook example of the “stranger comes to town” plot, the Harris’s relationship is thrown off balance when Rebecca’s feckless and beautiful younger brother, Ethan, comes to visit.

Cunningham writes intelligently about the art scene, but the primary focus of this novel is on the characters rather than the context. By Nightfall explores the precariousness of human relationships with sensitivity without shying away from the worst parts of human nature. With a fluid, stream-of-consciousness style of narration, Cunningham enters into Peter’s head and reveals his deepest thoughts and darkest desires. This point of view captures Peter’s second-by-second existence in a way that feels real and honest. Some of Peter’s decisions seem a bit impulsive and out of character, but, on the whole, By Nightfall is a revealing portrait of a man who almost loses everything in his reckless quest for love.