Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh

Trachtenberg writes like a cross between a maverick anthropologist and an existentialist adventurer. The story of how he pulled himself together after 13 years of heroin and speed addiction, a draining life of dope, sex, vodka, the agonizing deaths of both his parents from cancer and a string of tortured love affairs makes for a fiercely beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, incandescent memoir. His unsparing self-portrait is loosely organized around seven tattoos on his body, which serve as touchstones for his speculations on body and soul; on our banishment of death; trips to Borneo and Amsterdam, where he got tattooed; remembrances of his ""tattooed"" relatives, Holocaust victims whose skin was branded by Nazi camp guards; and an analysis of 1940s noir films with their fantasy of domineering, sadistic men passively submitting to evil women. Trachtenberg, who grew up and lives in New York City, writes movingly of his strained relationship with his testy father, a socialist who fled Vienna in the 1920s, as the author struggles to come to terms with his Jewish heritage. A ""grievously lapsed Jew,"" he briefly tried Zen Buddhism and flirted with Catholicism. Winner of the Nelson Algren Award for short fiction, Trachtenberg (The Casanova Complex) clearly is a writer to watch. (May)