This week, the masterpiece "The Wall," new Murakami, and "The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women."
The Wall by H. G. Adler, trans. from the German by Peter Filkins (Random) - This is Adler’s third (posthumous) and final work in the Shoah trilogy (after The Journey and Panorama), one of the very few works of Holocaust fiction written by a survivor. The author, once a prisoner at Theresienstadt and three other concentration camps, crafted this modernist homage to his despair over the course of many years; it was first published in 1989. His protagonist, Arthur—most certainly Adler himself—is an exile in the “Metropolis,” a thinly disguised London. He lives a bemused existence with his second wife, Joanna, and their two children, going through the motions of being a father, and indeed of being human. He has suffered something so dreadful that it is almost impossible to articulate, but it seems that his first wife perished in the war, as did his parents. In his dreams, which reflect in an absurdist way the real horror he faced, he returns to his father’s haberdashery in Prague; sometimes his parents are still alive and sometimes they die before his very eyes. The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word. One cannot begin to share this author’s anguish, but can participate in not allowing it to be forgotten.
You Must Remember This: Poems by Michael Bazzett (Milkweed) - Bazzett, a Minneapolis high school teacher, delivers a debut collection whose mercurial sensibility and loose-woven free verse place him somewhere between Robert Hass and Patricia Lockwood. His pages stand out, amid so many other mildly quirky or eccentric first books, because their verse comes closer than most to presenting real people in his imagined world. Strange events—part charm, part menace—take place throughout: postapocalyptic humans believe that “the point of existence/ was to gather things in concentric rings”; a couple decide to “settle their divorce in mime court”; clouds “made of human/ limbs and torsos” rain blood; a very old blind man predicts that “you will one day befriend an orangutan,” though when the orangutan shows up (in another poem) he turns out to be a robot who fathers an interspecies child. Bazzett's collection is never slowed down by self-consciousness: instead, it’s entertaining in its sadness, off-kilter, and defiantly hard to explain.
Memory of Flames by Armand Cabasson, trans. from the French by Isabel Reid (Gallic) - Set in 1814, Cabasson’s exceptional third Napoleonic Murders whodunit (after Wolf Hunt) finds Bonaparte’s depleted forces reeling as the allies advance on Paris. Against that dramatic backdrop, the emperor’s self-important older brother, Joseph, believes that royalists plan to murder key members of the team charged with defending the city. The first victim, Colonel Berle, was working at home on a proposal for Joseph to “transform the mound at Montmartre into an impregnable redoubt.” Besides torturing and mutilating Berle, his assassin left behind a royalist emblem, a “white rosette with a medallion in the middle decorated with a fleur-de-lis in the shape of an arrowhead crossed with a sword” known as the Swords of the King. Joseph orders Lt. Col. Quentin Margont to infiltrate the royalist movement and identify the killer as well as discover the plotters’ broader schemes.
Enter Pale Death by Barbara Cleverly (Soho Crime) - British author Cleverly’s excellent 12th whodunit featuring Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Joe Sandilands offers her sleuth a number of genuinely baffling crimes to solve. In June 1933, Sir James Truelove, a government minister expected to become the next Home Secretary and thereby Sandilands’s new boss, asks him to help retrieve a pair of family portraits that are up for sale at a London auction house. Truelove hopes that the presence of a uniformed copper will deter other bidders. Despite misgivings about whether he’s been given the full story, Sandilands complies and lands the artwork. Meanwhile, an anonymous letter writer advises Sandilands to look beyond the official verdict of “death by misadventure” of a titled lady killed by a dangerous stallion in the stables at Truelove’s family estate in Cambridge three months earlier.
The Triangle: A Year on the Ground with New York's Bloods and Crips by Kevin Deutsch (Globe Pequot/Lyons) - Deutsch, a criminal justice writer for Newsday, spent a year among the Bloods and Crips who occupy the Triangle, a once prosperous but now blighted area in Hempstead, Long Island, described by one local (and former Iraq vet) as a "war zone." Shootings there are commonplace, as are beatings and sexual assaults. Anyone in the area who is perceived to cooperate with the police is dealt with swiftly and severely; and so the cycle goes on. Deutsch's immersion in the community is evident from the range of people he profiles—from a newly initiated gang member to a college graduate who left the corporate world for the drug trade (he likens the long-running Bloods-Crips feud to "some kind of corporate fight you'd read about in the Wall Street Journal, only this is about our kind of business: rock cocaine"), to the ex-gang members and churchgoers who patrol the area nightly in an effort to bring peace. There are many stories here, and Deutsch gives readers a 360-degree view of the community.
Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall (HMH) - Near the start of this rich essay collection, former U.S. poet laureate Hall—also a biographer, children’s book writer, and literary critic—writes that “poetry abandoned” him after he turned 85, but his prose writing endures and sustains him. And as this book shows, Hall—who sometimes puts his essays through more than 80 drafts—has not lost his touch. Laconic, witty, and lyrical, Hall is a master stylist, yet he remains refreshingly humble and matter-of-fact about fame (his and others): “Everyone knows medals are made of rubber.” Hall’s topics are often autobiographical: the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon; his passion for garlic; a car trip through post-WWII Yugoslavia on impassable roads; the limitations of advanced age (“old age is a ceremony of losses”); poetry’s rise in popularity; how “devastated” he felt after being appointed poet laureate; and always, his attachment to his ancestral home in New Hampshire, Eagle Pond Farm, and the ever-changing landscape around it.
Where Have You Been? Selected Essays by Michael Hofmann (FSG) - The heft of these 30 substantial, methodical essays answers the title of this collection from critic, poet, and translator Hofmann (Behind the Lines). The subjects include fiction writing, poetry, and, briefly, painting and film. Hofmann is equally deft when lingering over a haiku by Seamus Heaney or expounding on the art of translation, which he compares to the “setting of a broken bone, a graft.” Hofmann’s touchstones are Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Schuyler, so it’s fitting that he begins by examining the Lowell–Bishop correspondence and includes individual essays on each of these poets. His famous 2010 takedown of Stefan Zweig (he “just tastes fake”) clearly establishes Hofmann’s willingness to set himself against popular opinion. His admiring essays on Robert Walser, John Berryman, and Basil Bunting, on the other hand, might well send readers running back to the original texts.
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women edited by Alex Daily MacFarlane (Running) - Written in the form of letters, travelogues, encyclopedia entries, and galactic gazetteers as well as conventional narratives, and embracing approaches that include folktales (Nalo Hopkinson’s “Tan-Tan and Dry Bone”), Lovecraftian horror (Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Boojum”), steampunk (Tori Truslow’s “Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day”), and hard SF (Nisi Shawl’s “Good Boy”), the 33 stories that MacFarlane (Aliens: Recent Encounters) has gathered for this volume dazzle with the virtuosity of their contributors’ talents. Particularly outstanding are Carrie Vaughn’s “Astrophilia,” a gripping postapocalyptic scenario, and Nnedi Okorafor’s “Spider the Artist,” a searing indictment of capitalist exploitation of poor countries. A clutch of selections feature characters embarked on quests for identity: ethnic, in Zen Cho’s “The Four Generations of Chang E,” about an Asian family’s assimilation into lunar society; sexual, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mountain Ways,” about a culture whose sexual politics complicates freedom of choice. Representing nearly a dozen countries and twice as many ethnicities, this book’s contents offer something for every fan of well-written SF.
The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer by Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon (Random) - Mailer’s ambition to be the greatest writer of his generation is made clear in his stylish, sophisticated letters. The novelist wrote at least 45,000 over the course of his long life, and this fascinating and lively volume reprints many hundreds (716, to be precise). The book begins in 1940, when Mailer was a Harvard undergraduate, and ends with just weeks before his death in 2007; his letters span from the atom bomb to the Huffington Post, in other words. A list of Mailer’s correspondents reads like a guide to 20th-century history and literature: Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Fidel Castro, Hunter S. Thompson, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and dozens of others.
The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami, trans. from the Japanese by Ted Goossen (Knopf) - A boy's routine day at the public library becomes a trip down the rabbit hole in Murakami's (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) short novel. The boy meets a demanding old man, who forces him to read the books he's requested in a hidden reading room in the basement. After following the labyrinthine corridors, the boy is led by the old man into a cell, where he must memorize the history of tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. In the bowels of the library, the boy meets a beautiful, mute girl who brings him meals, as well as a subservient sheepman (whom we also meet in Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase) who fixes the boy crispy doughnuts and clues him in to the old man's sadistic plans. Full-page designs from Chip Kidd divide the sections, bolstering the book's otherworldliness.
Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist by Chard Orzel (Basic) - We all have an inner scientist, and Orzel, a professor of physics at Union College, says we put those inner scientists to work every day—whether we realize it or not. Orzel winnows down science to four basic steps: “Looking” involves collecting observations and searching for patterns, as Darwin did to create his theory on the origin of species. “Thinking” means reviewing your data and coming up with an explanation—a model—for what you’ve seen, the way Dmitri Mendeleev studied chemical properties of different substances to create the periodic table of the elements. “Testing” means devising experiments to test your model, as physicists did to determine what atoms are made of. “Telling” is sharing the story of your work with others. His vivid examples include pop culture touchstones Iron Chef and Where’s Waldo?, fantasy sports leagues, and the citizen-scientist organization Zooniverse.
Here by Richard McGuire (Pantheon) - Expanding on an influential piece that first appeared in Raw in 1989, McGuire, best known for his illustrated children’s books, explores a single patch of land (apparently in Perth Amboy, N.J.) over the course of millions of years. As in the earlier version, McGuire’s perspective is fixed in what is (for most of the book) the corner of a family room, even as the narrative skips across centuries. At the beginning and end, dinosaurs and futuristic animals (respectively) stalk pages unadorned by people. But throughout most of the book, the reader sees human families dance, die, celebrate, fracture, and just live. A Native American couple makes out in the woods, people in 1980s garb pose for a portrait, a 24th-century team waves Geiger counters, a 1999 cat pads across the frame, and so on. The flat, hard lines produce art that looks like an approximation of Edward Hopper’s clean bright paintings, created on an outdated computer program. McGuire threads miniplots and knowing references through his hopscotch narrative, building up a head of steam that’s almost overwhelmingly poignant. His masterful sense of time and the power of the mundane makes this feel like the graphic novel equivalent of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
Now That You're Here by Amy Nichols (Knopf) - Danny Ogden is a graffiti artist for an extremist sect when an explosion thrusts him into a Phoenix classroom on a parallel Earth—ours. Eevee Solomon, 15, is his only connection to home; a romantic acquaintance in his semi-totalitarian dimension, she’s a brilliant science nerd in this one, and perhaps the only person who can help him return to his world. Debut novelist Nichols explores this jarring turn of events from both characters’ perspectives as a disoriented Danny muddles through a world where his parents are dead while Eevee must reconcile that the Danny who tormented her best friend has been replaced by a boy with whom she’s falling in love. Nichols infuses the story with a smattering of science fiction and science fact, while making a welcome departure from the stereotype of the book-smart outcast trying to fit in.
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Pantheon) - British author Smith (There but for The), a playful, highly imaginative literary iconoclast, surpasses her previous efforts in this inventive double novel that deals with gender issues, moral questions, the mystery of death, the value of art, the mutability of time, and several other important topics. Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently and with different emphases; which narrative one reads first depends on chance, as different copies of the book have been printed with different opening chapters. In one version, the androgynous adolescent character George (for Georgia) is mourning the sudden death of her mother following a family trip to Italy, where they viewed a painting by the obscure Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa. The alternate volume begins with Francesco, recounting stories of the painter’s youth and the ongoing creation of a fresco in a palazzo in Ferrara, a process described in vibrant detail. Francesco’s secret is disclosed in both sections—teasingly in one, overtly in the other. This dual narrative is captivating.
Diamond Boy by Michael Williams (Little, Brown) - Williams turns in a riveting tale about 15-year-old Patson Moyo, who becomes a diamond farmer, working in the Marange diamond fields of 2006 Zimbabwe, to help provide for his family. Patson risks life and limb, hoping to find common ngodas or ultra-rare girazis—diamonds that could change his life for the better. But when the army moves in and takes the fields for themselves, Patson’s freedom is stripped away. A rapid string of brutal tragedies follow, including death and dismemberment, and Patson’s only hope for survival is to follow his younger sister to South Africa, aided by a mysterious Congolese mercenary. All the while, he is relentlessly hunted by a powerful military leader who thinks Patson is the key to finding girazis. Williams draws from real events to bring this harrowing story to life, infusing Patson’s narrative with terrifying accuracy.
