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contributors
Gabriel Ba
Andrew D. Arnold
Eddie Campbell
Fabio Moon
Anders Nilsen
has been writing about comics for Timemagazineand its website for over five years.You can readhis past works at www.time.com/comix. He lives in Brooklyn.
Eddie Campbell
is the authorof TheFateof theArtist(FirstSecondBooks)and co-author(with Alan Moore)of FromHell,published by Top Shelf Books.
Armando Celayo
has been an editorialassistantat WLTsince 2005.He also serves as co-editorof WLT2and Windmill,the University of Oklahoma'stwo student-runliteraryjournals.
J. Madison Davis
is the authorof severalcrimenovels and nonfictionbooks, most recentlyTheVanGoghConspiracy (2005)and Conspiracy and the Freemasons:How the Secret Society and Their Enemies Shapedthe Modern World(2006). He serves as
regionalvice presidentof the North Americanbranchof the InternationalAssociationof CrimeWritersand teaches novel and film-scriptwriting in the ProfessionalWritingProgramof the GaylordCollege of Journalism& Mass Communicationat the Universityof Oklahoma. Nick Flynn
Bunmi Ishola
Chris Lanier
Ashley Lin Ling Chuan-Yao
Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba
has published two books of poetry.His first,SomeEther,won the PEN/Joyce OsterweilAward. His second, Blind Huber,was published in 2002.His most recentbook is AnotherBullshitNightin SuckCity,which won the PEN/ MarthaAlbrandAward for the Art of the Memoir.His work has been publishedin the New Yorker,the ParisReview, and many othermagazinesand journals.No strarlgerto collaboration,Flynnwas involved in the productionof the AcademyAward-nominatedDarwin'sNightmare(2006).Othercollaborativeeffortshave involved dance,film, music, and visual arts.He spends one semesterper year at the Universityof Houston,where he has co-taughta course in artisticcollaboration. has been interningwith WLTsince summer2006.She graduatedfrom TexasA&MUniversitywith a bachelor's degree in Journalismand Englishin May 2006and is hoping to startgraduateschool in journalismin fall 2007. is a cartoonist,animator,and writer.His comic Combustion (FantagraphicsBooks, 1999)is an homage to the woodcut novel. He is currentlyearninghis MFAat the Universityof Californiaat Davis and working on his latest graphicnovel. is currentlyan honors student at the Universityof Oklahoma.She is seeking a degree in creativewriting. has been an editorialinternat WLTsince summer2006.A native of Singapore,he is currentlyseeking a degree in professionalwriting at the Universityof Oklahoma. who are twins, live and work in Sao Paulo, Brazil,where they began self-publishingin 1993.Fouryears laterthey began drawing theirfirstwork that would grabthe attentionof the Brazilianpublic, 10 Paezinhos,which has become the standardfor independentcomics publishingin Brazil.Theirwork first appearedin the United Statesin 1999, when they served as illustratorsfor the miniseriesRoland.At that time, they still hoped to write superherocomicsby theirown account,they were fortunateto fail miserably.In 2003they were publishedalongside longtime and they influenceWill Eisnerand severalothercomic-booklegends in the DarkHorse collectionAutobiographix, releasedthe novella Ursulain 2004.DarkHorse published their firstwidespreadU.S. release,De:Tales,in 2006.Both
Yuyi Morales
Rob Vollmar
David Shook, LingChuan-Yao, and Armando Celayo
twins sometimesillustratefor U.S. authorsand Braziliannewspapers.Ba designed and illustratedthe frontcover for the currentissue. Yuyi Morales
is an author,artist,puppetmaker,folk dancerand was the host of her own Spanish-languageradioprogramfor children.Otherbooks she has written and/or illustratedincludeJusta Minute:A Trickster TaleandCountingBook, winner of the PuraBelpreMedal;HarvestingHope:TheStoryof CesarChavez,a PuraBelpreHonorBook;and Los GatosBlackon Halloween.She has also receivedthe JaneAddams and ChristopherAwards for her work. Bornin Veracruz,Mexico,Moralesnow makesher home in the San Franciscoarea.
Josh Neufeld
A native New Yorker,JoshNeufeld's comics abouthis travelexperiencesin SoutheastAsia and CentralEurope are told in the XericAward-winning graphicnovel A FewPerfectHours.He is the creatorof the comicbook The and the co-creatorof Keyholeand Titansof Finance:TrueTalesof MoneyandBusiness.Joshhas been a Vagabonds artist for Harvey Pekar'sAmericanSplendorand has contributedto many comics anthologies.His comics longtime the have also appearedin ReadyMade, the VillageVoice,FortuneSmallBusiness,the AustinAmerican-Statesman, ChicagoReader,the CommonReview,and In TheseTimesand have been translatedinto Frenchand Serbian.Josh resides in Brooklyn,New York,and makes a living mixing comics with freelanceillustration.You can find his work online at joshcomix.com.
Anders Nilsen
is the artistand authorof Big Questions,Monologues' for theComingPlague,Don'tGoWhereI Can'tFollow,and Dogs andWater,which won an IgnatzAward. His work has been translatedinto severallanguagesand has been featured in BestAmericanNon-required Ergot,and Momealong with otherpublications Reading,BestAmericanComics,Kramer's and anthologies.Bornin northernNew Hampshirein 1973,Anders grew up there and in Minneapolisand went to school in New Mexicoto study paintingand installationbeforeeventuallymoving to Chicagoto go to graduate school at the Schoolof the Art Institute.He dropped out aftera year to devote his time and energy to drawing comics and otherartwork.He currentlylives and works in Chicago.
Elif Shafak
David Shook Stephen E. Tabachnick
Rob Vollmar
is the authorof five previous novels and a collectionof essays, including,most recently,TheGazeand TheSaintof IncipientInsanities,her first novel writtenin English.In Turkeyshe has won the MevlanaPrize for literatureas well as the TurkishNovel Award;TheBastardof Istanbulwas a best-sellerthere.She splits her time between Istanbul and Tucson,Arizona,where she is an assistantprofessorof Near EasternStudies at the Universityof Arizona.Her Post,the LosAngelesTimes,and the WallStreetJournal,and she has been op-ed pieces have run in the Washington featuredon NationalPublicRadio.Her essay on soft power and the role of Turkishintellectualsappearedin the January2006issue of WLT. has been an editorialinternat WLTsince spring 2006. is chairof the Englishdepartmentat the Universityof Memphisand the author,most recently,of FiercerThan (2004).He is currentlyediting Tigers:TheLifeandWorksof RexWarner(2002)and Lawrence ofArabia:An Encyclopedia TeachingtheGraphicNovel,a collectionof originalessays, for the ModernLanguageAssociation. is a writerof and about comics from Norman,Oklahoma.His second graphicnovel with artistPabloG. Callejo, Bluesman,is due for releasein its collectedform in summer2007from NBMPublishing.
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March-April 2007
EXECUTIVEDIRECTOR& NEUSTADT PROFESSOR
EDITOR IN CHIEF
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Maria Johnson
ART DIRECTOR
ASSISTANT EDITOR
ACCOUNTS SPECIALIST
Rimvydas Silbajoris Han Stavans Theodore Ziolkowski
David Draper Clark Daniel Simon
MARKETING DIRECTOR
Roger Allen Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda Manuel Duran Howard Goldblatt George Gomori Talat S. Halman Alamgir Hashmi Vasa D. Mihailovich Tanure Ojaide
Robert Con Davis-Undiano
MANAGING EDITOR
CIRCULATIONMANAGER
EDITORIALBOARD
Volume 81, Number 2
CONTRIBUTINGEDITORS
Pamela Genova Emily Johnson Rainer Schulte ASSOCIATE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Mohammad Alhawary Jose Juan Colin J. Madison Davis Yoshiko Fukushima Mary Margaret Holt Andrew Horton Jason Houston Dustin Howard Michael Lee Jonathan Stalling
Victoria Vaughn Terri D. Stubblefield Merleyn Ruth Bell Michelle Johnson Kay Blunck
STUDENT INTERNS
BOARD OF VISITORS
Tyler Allen Sydneyann Binion Amy Dawn Bourlon Alexis Caldwell Armando Celayo Josh Davis Darlene Dillon Olubunmi Ishola Lisa K. Janssen Amanda Kehrberg Elizabeth Lewis Ashley Lin Ling Chuan-Yao Patrick Maddox Allison Meier Jeanetta Calhoun Mis Will O'Donnell Jennifer Sanders David Shook Charlie Swanson Amanda Theaker Jessica Walker Marie Zelaya
Molly Shi Boren S. Ross Clarke Cheryl Foote Groenendyke Sarah C. Hogan Judy Zarrow Kishner Mary D. Nichols Susan Neustadt Schwartz George A. Singer Jeanne Hoffman Smith Lela Sullivan James R. Tolbert III,Chair Lew 0. Ward Martha Griffin White Penny Williams
www.worldliteraturetoday.com World Literature Today is published bimonthly at the Universityof Oklahoma / 630 ParringtonOval, Suite 110 /Norman, Oklahoma 73071-4033. Periodicalspostage paid at Norman, Oklahoma 73070. Copyright © 2007 by World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the Universityof Oklahoma. Advertising and subscription rates are listed on our website or are available through the editorial office. Ph: 405.325.4531 . Fax:405.325.7495. 6,600 copies of this publication were printed at no cost to the taxpayers of the State of Oklahoma.
letted Crisis and Renewal I am pleasedto see WorldLiterature Todaycontinueto explorethe significant themes of our times. In your July-August 2006 issue, there is so much to comment on- and such a wide rangeof possibilitiesto reflect on for the futureof our planet- that I could have chosen at will from the various essays, interviews, and literaryexamples.Instead,I will focus on the contrastbetween hope and despair exemplifiedin some of the selections. On the one hand, there is the grim world of despairfor the women in Algiers as portrayed in Assia Djebar's work, and it may well serve as a symbol of a more general crisis in Western civilization:How do we as Westerners"get inside the heads" of people of other cultures sufficiently to see them with a combinationof compassion and a willingness to assist them but always, and only, from their point of view, from theirperspectiveoutside of Westernculture,and not try to make them become like us? At the same time as our planet continues its mysterioustrek through the cosmos, there is always hope for at least a better understandingof this world, here and now, a quiet hope, as in the last lines of "My Favorite Kingdom/7by Li-Young Lee: "And the birds go there / bearing the weight of every sky." Or, as Kwame Dawes puts it in "Islanders": "the notion of family, the smell of
history- / and journeyis a memory of what we are to live." We live in fluid times, where cultures migrate, flow across the increasinglymeaningless boundaries, borders,and frontiersof nationstates, and poets, like all artists,are in exile everywhere and nowhere and at home nowhere and everywhere. Aesthetics reflects this fluidity, also, in Maria Benitez's flamenco that returnsto Spain and to the world her highly personalinterpretation of the music and dance of Andalucia. To add one more note: this triumph of a committed aestheticsover shallower,more limited, more denigrating,and less imaginative views of the human conditionis convincinglyillustrated in the interview with Yo-Yo Ma. The Silk Road Project's aim "to exploreartisticexchangesand international collaborations"is breathtakingly refreshing. It points the way to the kinds of international artisticcollaborationsthat could set an example for all areas of human endeavor. Or is that too much to hope for?I hope not. E. A. Mares Albuquerque,New Mexico
On Poetry and Bookstores Thereis nothing wrong with Barnes & Noble, Borders,or even Amazon, but for readers, scholars, and bibliophiles who care more about the book than bargainsor convenience,
thereis nothing like a literarybookstore. Lamentably,the independent bookshop must struggle to survive because chains can purchase material at such steep discounts that smaller stores cannot compete financially;additionally, one must travel considerablyfartherthan the localmall in orderto visit, for example, the now defunctShakespeare& Co. And yet a purposefultrip to the GothamBookmartin New Yorkor Cody's in Berkeley(currentlylimited to one location)is very different than a quickpurchaseof Needlecraft for Dummiesat Waldenbooks.In the distant past, one could spot Tennessee Williams wrapping books (unsuccessfully,which led to his firing) at the Gothamor, more recently, FrancisSteloff,the founder,hard at work at her desk, although she was one hundredyears old. Eudora Welty or Jorge Luis Borges would
March -April 2007 1 3
A very colorful note from Zia Matoori, one of our subscribers in Columbia, Missouri.
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stop by, and anyone could locate treasuresburied away in the basement(e.g.,multiplecopies of firsteditionsthatHenryMiller and his peers had sent along forty or fifty years earlier). It is thereforeastonishingthat the ElectronicPoetryCenter (epc)lists twelve stores that specialize in verse, two of which deal exclusively in poetry: the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge,Massachusetts,and Open Booksin Seattle,which Laura Wideburgprofiles so lovingly in your July-August 2006 issue ("Outposts,"page 80). The Grolier,which has purveyed poetry for almost eighty years and stocks fifteen thousandtitles, is not a direct competitorof Open Books, since it lies three thousand miles away. Instead,these two shops balancethe country,drawing poetry aficionados from various distant locations to their doors. "Poetryis strong medicine,"insists TerryHauptman.It can be found in abundancein the specialtybookshops. RobertHauptman St. Cloud State University
Letters to the editor are welcome and may be e-mailed to
[email protected] or sent care of: WLT Letters 630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110 University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019-4033 USA can be printed, and those letters Not all correspondence chosen may be edited for clarity and space as needed. The editors and publishers assume no responsibility for contributors' opinions.
Poncia Vicencio by Concei^aO EvariSto/ translatedby PalomaMartinez-Cruz Poncia.Vicencio, the debut novel by Afro-Brazilianauthor Conceicao Evansto, is the story of a young Afro-Brazilianwoman'sjourneyfrom the land of her enslaved ancestors to the emptiness of urban life. However,the generationsof creativity,violence and familycannotbe so easilyleft behind as Ponciais heir to a mysteriouspsychicgift from her grandfather.Does tinsgift have the powerto bringPonciabackfromthe emotionalvacuum and absolute solitude that has overtakenher in the city? Do the elementalforcesof earth,air,fireandwatermeananythingin the barrenurbanlandscape?Tins mysticalstory of family,dreamsand hope by the incomparableEvansto, illuminatesaspects of urban and rural Afro-Brazilianconditionswith poetic eloquenceand rawurgency. 9~8-O-924O4~-33-6 - $20.00 hardcover 9~8-O-924O4~-34-3 - S 12.00 softcover 5 ' ' x 8 ' "' 140 page^
I^^2^ffl!^5^^^^ 4 I World Literature Today
ddESoif § DHoSi As the editors of WorldLiterature Todaystrive to offer extensive coverageof contemporarywriting fromthroughoutthe world, we realizethatwith rapidlychanging global technology- especiallywith regardto the electronicscreen(e.g., video games, the Internet,cable television)- the medium of the book has often taken on hybridelementsin termsof formatand visual presentation. With that in mind, the current issue of WLTfocuses on graphic literature, which is read by millions of readers throughout the globe stretchingfrom Belgium,Germany,Iran,and Indiato Japan,Cuba,Mexico,and the United States. Many authors in the West who had traditionallybeen representedby theirtexts alone have occasionallyincorporatedgraphic elements in their work similar to those identified with comic books. Julio Cortazar(Argentina;1914-84)provided one such examplewith the publicationof his Fantomascontralos vampirosmultinacionales(1977),and, more recently,Paul Auster (usa) with Cityof Glass(1985)as well as LauraEsquivel (Mexico)with La ley del amor(1995;Eng. TheLawof Love, 1996;replete with a cd). Clearerexamples of the rise in popularityof the graphic novel areevidencedby such full-timepractitionersof the genreas FabioMoonand GabrielBa (Brazil),MarjaneSatrapi(Iran),and RobVollmar(usa). Eddie Campbell{seepage13) readilyacknowledgesthe confusionrepresented by the deceptively simple phrase graphicnovelby defining its layeredmeanings and connotations.For some, graphicnovels are synonymous with comic books, yet they can also representcomics that are presented in hard- or softbound formats like books ratherthan as the stapled sheets we've come to associatewith most traditional comics and many magazines. Campbell further explains that graphicnovels also presentcomic-booknarrativesthat are equivalentin form and dimension to those of the prose novel. And finally, graphicnovels have come to assume a form that looks like comic books but is more ambitiousand substantive in their scope. We have attemptedto present various perspectiveson and examples of the genre in light of the growing confluenceof word, picture,and typographythat is becomingincreasinglyprevalentin publishing.The genre'simportanceis undeniable as it continues to reach a wider audience worldwide and as the visual arts continueto occupy a commandingpresencein our lives. The currentissue marks somewhat of a departurefrom our regularfare but is consistentwith our desire to keep abreastof new literatureand literaryforms, wherever and whenever they occur.In addition to the expertiseprovided by our individualcontributorslisted on the tableof contents,our specialsectionon graphic literatureis due in large part to the vision and hard work of WLTinternsDavid Shook, Ling Chuan-Yao,Armando Celayo, Olubunmi Ishola, and Ashley Lin, along with our staff membersMariaJohnson,MichelleJohnson,VictoriaVaughn, and TerriStubblefield.Special thanks are also due WLT'sart director,Merleyn Bell, and managing editor, Daniel Simon, who helped coordinateproductionof the project,and, finally,to our executivedirector,RobertCon Davis-Undiano,who works tirelesslyto diversify our coverage. c^y^^^c
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March-April 2007 15
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6l Myst ^^ J. MADISON DAVIS
HIS "CUSTOMERS" WERETHE JURY MICKEYSPILLANE(1918-2006)
STUDENTOF MINE SOme
years ago told me how he had taken a summer job in the Charleston, South Carolina, area as a house painter and was told to go to the Morrison house at Murrells Inlet. Usually, homeownerscan'twait to get away fromthe mess and the smell,but Mr. Morrison (so they thought) hung around, chatting without barking orders, bringing them cool drinks. He was charming and funny, but they were getting a little tired of his persistence. They asked him from what business he had retired. "I'mnot retired/' he laughed. "I'm a writer/' Suddenly, then, they knew why he had seemed familiar. "FrankMorrison"was FrankMorrison Spillane: "Mickey Spillane," perhaps the only living novelist recognizable enough to appear in one hundred Miller Lite beer commercials. Over the next few days, they asked Spillane many of the usual questionsnonwritersask published writers. Where do you get your ideas? How many hours a day do you write? How long does it take you to write a book? His answers seemed flippant, like jokes he had repeated many times. He didn't get ideas; he just started.He wrote however many hours he needed to get finished. How long it took to write a book depended on alimony, when the rent was due, and blown
6
World Literature Today
gaskets. Once, he said, desperate for money, he had written a novel on a weekend. In September 1989 HurricaneHugo crashedinto South Carolina,destroyinghis house, and it was only a matterof weeks before Spillane was on the TonightShow promotingTheKillingMan,his first
Mike Hammernovel since 1970,to pay for repairs. According to legend, he wrote his first novel I, the Jury (1947) in nine days, in order to get $1,000 for a piece of land. Once, he told the house painters, he had been takinga manuscriptto the publisherand lost it. Thatmust
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have been awful, said the painters. "No big deal/' said Spillane,"Ijust typed it out again/' You would suspect from all this that Frank Morrison Spillane was a man who played his own character,MickeySpillane,and that Mickey Spillane often played his character,Mike Hammer. Yet no one I know ever indicatedthey had seen anythingthat revealedhe was other than what he appearedto be, a genuinely unassuming person. He was never pretentious about his work, and on the one occasion I met him at the Edgar Allan Poe awardsbanquetof the Mystery Writersof America in 2000, when he was eighty-two and long a legend, he pumped my hand as if he were thoroughly pleased to meet me,not vice versa. He seemed thoroughly pleased to meet everyone who wanted to meet him, and, in that room filled with many of the most successful mystery writers in the world, everyone did. The MysteryWritersof America honoredhim in 1995by designating him a Grandmaster,but pleased as he was, he had always refusedto become a memberof the MWA.He also pleasantlydeclined our invitation to join the InternationalAssociation of CrimeWriters,as we knew he would. "Frankly/7 he wrote, "beinga writer and not an author, I never thought anybody would want me in their club anyway."1 He was just a "writer,"he insisted, and referredto his readersas "customers."His advice on the literary arts was merely, "Keepthe writers on typewriters. Thereis no music to a computer!"2Critics and authors didn't hear the music, trashing his books and his prose style. Anthony Bouchersaid thatI, theJurywas "so vicious a glorificationof force, cruelty and extra-legal methods that
the novel might be made required reading in a Gestapo training school."3Raymond Chandler said, "Pulpwritingat its worst was never as bad as this stuff."4The Saturday Review of Literaturepanned it with
the summation,"Luridaction,lurid characters,lurid writing, lurid plot, lurid finish. Verdict: Lurid."5The customerspaid no attention. "If the public likes you, you're good," Spillane said.6 He is estimated to have sold two hundred million copies of thirteen novels through 2006. Of the top fifteen best-selling books by 1980, seven of them were by Spillane.7At one point, he was estimated to be the fifth most translated author of all time, behind Lenin,Tolstoy,Gorky, and Jules Verne.8/, the Jury alone sold two million copies in paperback on its release and is credited with creatingthe marketfor paperback originals.9The literarynovelists today, who can find a venue for their work only among the trade paperbacks, may owe him more than they let on. Almost the only writer who defended him in his 'early career was, curiously,Ayn Rand."Youare the only modernwriterwith whom I do share the loyalty of my best readers- and I am proud of this," she wrote to him.10The two of them commiseratedabouttheirtreatment at the hands of critics, and some people think that Randhad a crush on him. It's not hard to imagine him as the novelist equivalent of Howard Roark. Mike Hammer, his detective hero, was played by several actors (Stacy Keach, Darren McGavin, Ralph Meeker, and Armand Assante,among them) and by Spillane himself in the 1963 movie The Girl Hunters.How many novelists have ever had the chanceto portray
the lead role of their own creation? It's not a very good movie, but Spillane is better in the lead role than most of the professionalactors around him. Readers often speculate on how much a characteris a reflectionof the writer,but the case of Spillanegets even more perplexing when we considerthat in 1951, after four novels, he converted to the Jehovah's Witness faith and spent almosta decadegoing door to door as a missionary.If you liked I, theJury,doll, you'll love TheWatchtower?He was a Jehovah'sWitness who promotedfor two decades- in one of the world's most successful advertisingcampaigns- an alcoholic beverage?Duringhis hiatusfrom writing, Hammer'strenchcoat was empty. Numerous imitatorstried it on. Like the glass slipper, it never quite fit. I, theJuryplainly owes a great deal to The Maltese Falcon in its
portrayal of a scheming woman who manipulatesthe detectivewith her sexuality. There is, however, a much strongerelementof misogyny in Mike Hammer'sshooting Charlotte Manningin her "starknaked" stomach and saying, "Itwas easy," than in Sam Spade's tortureddecision to turn Brigid O'Shaughnessy over to the cops. We could ascribe it to the postwar attemptto restore prewarnormalcyby the assertionof the "normal"male dominancefantasizedby all those men whose lives were disrupted by World War II. We could attributethe popularity of Mike Hammer to readers'pleasure in the fantasy of restoringan imaginaryAmericawhere men are men and women are women, and commie infiltrators need a good dose of lead. Anotheraspect of the popularity is Spillane's insistence on not looking down his nose at the reader.Like all good children's
March-April 2007 7
to his All the elements we can cite as contributing huge popularity and celebrity were present in most of his imitators and in many works by many authors before he gave up writing comic books for novels. perhaps the secret of his success is not in the particular ingredients but in the recipe's proportions and balance. literature (and Spillane did write two children's books), Spillane's novels never condescend. Most authorsdo, in one way or another. Your "customers"are your friends, said Spillane.Here,pal, have a beer. Try a little of the sex and violence while you're at it. That'swhat you like, isn't it? Well, yes, even the most sophisticatedreaders chew on sex and violence in some form, but all these explanationsand all the others, psychological and otherwise, aren't quite enough. All the elements we can cite as contributing to his huge popularityand celebrity were present in most of his imitators and in many works by many authorsbefore he gave up writing comic books for novels. Perhaps the secret of his success is not in the particularingredientsbut in the recipe's proportions and balance. This seems a peculiar equation to compareSpillanewith a chef- perhaps "cook"is better. As Spillane himself pointed out, you sell more salted peanuts than caviar. As we grow more sophisticated, we become more interested in subtler and subtler flavors, becoming dis-
8 I World Literature Today
missive of common fare, the meat and potatoes that shout, "Food!" Nevertheless, underlying all meals is basic hunger, and underlying our pleasure in novels is the basic hunger for story, that mundane bit about what happens next. We can pick out Spillane'sbad sentences and chuckle at the implausible plots, but even if his name fades in the future,it is difficultto dismiss anyone whose stories affected millions of people. Readers wanted his stories, perhaps needed them, in ways we can only dimly understand. It is so difficultto grasp this marvelous thing we call literature. Thereare only a few truly greatstorytellers in any generation,people who capture an age and perhaps speak to later ages as well, who captivate audiences as we imagine Homer or the Irish bards did by campfires on lonely nights. Whatever else he was, Mickey Spillane was a storyteller.He didn'tneed for me or Chandler or anyone else to think of him as an author.Perhaps most important of all, he saw no need to be one. Universityof Oklahoma
1Letterfrom Mickey Spillane to Mary director of the executive Frisque, North American Branchof the International Association of Crime Writers, May 24, 2000. 2Letterto Mary Frisque. 3 San Francisco Chronicle,August 3, 1947. 4 "Biography for Mickey Spillane," Internet Movie Database, www. imdb.com. 5 SaturdayReviewof Literature,August 9/ 19476 Cathy Burke, "Mickey'sFinal Chapter: Crime-Writing Legend Mickey Spillane Dies," New YorkPost, July 18, 2006, p. 24.
7 John Sutherland, "Mickey Spillane: Bestselling Writer of Shoot-emup Crime Novels," Guardian,July 18, 2006, books.guardian.co.uk/ obituaries. yJohn Holland, Mickey Spillane: You, the Jury," Crime Time, October 2, 2006, www.crimetime.co.uk/ features/ spillane.php. 9 Kevin Burton Smith, "Authors and Creators: Mickey Spillane"; and Max Allan Collins, "Mickey Spillane: This Time It's Personal," both at ThrillingDetective,www.thrillingdetective.com. 10John Meroney, "Mickey Spillane, Man of Mysteries," WashingtonPost, August 22, 2001, p. ci.
Alan Cheuse
A
Tribute
to
William
Styron
(1925-2006) Martha's Vineyard, 1973
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WhenI was an undergraduate,in the 1960s,filled with dreamsaboutthe artI might try to make and terrifiedby the worriessuch dreamingbroughtwith it, I wrote WilliamStyrona letter.I can'trecall how I found his address,but I rememberit well: WilliamStyron.Styron's Acres.Roxbury,Connecticut. And I do rememberwhat I wrote. It had to do with a story I had writtenabout a subjectthat,at the time,was quitetaboo- and who was I to know thatit was a silly shot in the dark,to write to the man who by thattime had establishedhimself as one of the majorliteraryfiguresof his generationand to ask an undergraduatequestion?- but he wrote back,in kindly, avuncularfashion,saying to me that he himself had tried to write a story when he was aroundthe same age as I was then aboutthe same subjectand not to worry . . . not to worry. (I wish I had the letterto quote directly,but who knows into what dustbinI tossed it afterrunningmy fingersa numberof times acrossthe embossedreturn address . . . Styron'sAcres,Roxbury,Connecticut.) Needless to say, he was one of those starsI steeredby for many years,a writerwith a deep conscienceand a broadgrasp of human characterand history,a novelist who dared to take on the great subjectsof his time- slavery,rebellion,the death camps and genocide . . . and, later,depressionand life's deep end- and gracefullyfielded the criticism,sometimesquite voluble and even threatening, that his work drew because of it. He made it seem like a great enterprise,and like his cohortsand contemporaries,JamesJones and Norman Mailer,gave us the impressionthat novel-writingwas a contactsport at which only the daringand brave tried theirtalents. LieDown in Darkness,which Styronpublished in 1951when he was only twenty-six,was one of the great debuts in twentieth-centuryAmericanfictionand held the attentionof droves of young writershoping to make as big an entrance,fromits hypnoticopening all the way throughto its stunning, patheticsuicide of the main characterat the end.
March-April 2007 19
OFTHEAIR Then came his marvelousnovella based on an incident from his life in the Marine Corps, The Long March. Next, Set This House on Fire, with its glori-
ous set-piece of a drive along the Italiancoast and its descriptionof a Sundaymorningin New YorkCity curled up with the newspapers.I can still see the dense type of its pages that I read and reread on my own sojourn to temporary expatriatelife in Europe. With these books, he had won the respect of his generationand the admirationof those of us younger and younger. With TheConfessions of Nat Turnerand Sophie'sChoice,he entered the
great spotlight of the AmericanConversationor Shouting Match- on questions of race and history. The scenes of the slave rebellionin the formerburned into readers'minds;the smell of the burning bodies in the exterminationovens in the latterstill lingersin my nostrils. I met him for the first time decades and decades later,long afterthe uproarand debates about whether or not a white southernermight permithimself to take on those dangeroussubjects that some of the commissarsof literature declaredout of bounds for him. I was on a prize jury,and he was speakingat a small dinneron a mellow autumn night in New YorkCity where the winner would accepthis award.Afterward, we walked along Fifth Avenue and talked a little, and- miraculously,without me remind-1 ing him- he asked if I hadn't once written him a letter?That was me, I said. He laughed and threw his armaroundmy shoulderand we kept on walking. He rememberedthat little bleat of mine from my undergraduatedays. I laughed along with him, embarrassedto rememberthe boy I once was.
A Tributeto
William
Styron
(1925-2006) On the few occasions after that when we met, we laughed again aboutit. And afterturning his talentto writing in the book called Darkness Visibleabout the clinical depression from which he had long suffered, Styron in his last published work of fiction turned the light on his own boyhood in A Tidewater Morning:Three Talesfrom Youth,which came out in 1993. In these inward-turning,beautifullyelegiacpages, he demonstratedonce again that good novelists have good memories,and great novelists have greatmemories,becausein the books they leave behind they give to future generationsscenes and storiesand charactersthat will stand as the memoryof us all. To WilliamStyron, late of Styron s Acres, Roxbury, Connecticut. . . thankyou for writing. Washington,D.C. Editorialnote:This piece first aired on November 2, 2006.Formore informationon NationalPublicRadio and its programming- and to listen to Alan Cheuse reading the on-air version of this tribute- visit the NPR website (www.npr.org). Alan Cheuse, "The Voice of Books'"on National Public Radio for nearly twenty-five years, has been sharing his "Off the Air" columns with WLT since 2005. His short fiction has appeared in such publications as the New Yorker,the AntiochReview, and Ploughshares,and he has been a member of the writing faculty at George Mason University in Fairfax,Virginia, since 1987. Copyright © 2006 by Alan Cheuse. Published by arrangementwith the author and National Public Radio.
10 I World Literature Today
liter Whether it deals primarilywith fantasy or with reality,the graphic novel is a form suited to the contemporary age because of its appeal to our newly learned sense that realitycan very quickly become fantasy, and vice versa, as well as its unique and comforting combination of the qualities of both book and screen. I contend that the graphic novel will continue to displace (if never completely replace) purely textual writing and that it will eventually become the most popular form of reading. That is because I think that, fortunately or unfortunately, we will watch realityand fantasy morph into each other many, many times in our collective lives in the years to come, not always pleasantly. The good news is that the graphic novel now offers just as many fine creative talents- and as subtle, plastic, and wonderful a reading experience- as any literarygenre ever has done. -
Stephen E. Tabachnick
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ANDREW D. ARNOLD
debateover comics' qualificationsas art has been crushed,like an icky spider, under a pile of masterfulbooks. Art Spiegelman's Maus, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan:The Smartest Kid on Earth, and
MarjaneSatrapi'sPersepolisare just a few of the ever-growinglist of importantworks of graphicalliteraturethat prove comic art can as much truth, carry beauty,mystery,emotion,and smartentertainmentas any of the other,more traditional,media of expression.Even the IvoryTowerhas admitted "graphic novels'7(an imperfect term that describes any book-length comic work, includingnonfiction)onto course lists. So now we can turn our attentionto more interestingcomparativequestions.Forexample,can comicscreatepoetrylike the works of Shakespeare,T. S. Eliot,or AleksandrPushkin? In short,no, but not from lack of merit or ability.Whilecomics have a similar delivery as poetry- books, paper, words, etc.- the language, syntax, and meaning of comics spring primarilythrough the relationshipbetween images rather than words. This is not just a differentballgamebut a differentsport. However, this does not exclude comics from achievingthe same artisticambitionsas poetry. Practicallysince theirinception,comicshave shown theirabilityto achievepowerful artistrythroughthe inspireduse of condensed,musical,and highly structured language. So, herewith a brief survey of some comic art that rivals the work of many a fine traditionalpoet. Earlyon, during the explosion of newspaperstripsin the early twentiethcentury, creatorshad the rarekind of artisticfreedom that comes from a total lack of rules or precedent.As a result, some of the wildest feats of artisticimaginationin the historyof the medium occurredat its inception.Perhapsno pioneeringcomics
12 I World Literature Today
artistcame as close to poetic perfectionas George Herriman (1880-1944),authorof KrazyKat,which appeared in newspapers from 1913 until the author'sdeath. Like few others,Herrimandeveloped his own "voice"both in his writtenand visual languageto createa work beloved by some of the most highly regarded artists and intellectuals of the time. GilbertSeldes, culturalessayist par excellence,praised it in his now-classic 1924 book The SevenLivelyArtsas "themost amusing and fantasticand satisfactorywork of art produced in Americato-day." Herrimanused the core dynamic of his three prin- lovesick Krazy Kat, brick-throwing cipal characters Ignatz Mouse, and dutiful Offica Pup- like a sonnet form,endlessly riffingon the characters'relationshipsto get at somethingprofoundlytragicand funny about life. One full-page Sunday strip from 1937 exemplifies the many beauties of KrazyKat.Over the course of several panels, Krazy seeks seclusion under a tree and begins writing in a diary.Littleheartsbubbleout of its pages as she does so. She speaks to herself in the oddball patois that is one of the strip's hallmarks."I are alone," she says, "Jetzme . . . an' jetz my dee-dee diary."She puts the diary under a rock and incants over it, "Now beck into sigglution, witch only these kobbil rocks, this blue bin butch-the moon an' the dokk, dokk night know. An' they won't tell-you is illone."The final panel, stretching the width of the page, shows all the other characters readingthe book aftershe has left. In a single page, Herriman creates not a traditionalpoem but its comic-art equivalent. It has playfulness about both the language ("dee dee diary," "dokk, dokk night") and the images (thebackgroundchangesfrompanel to panel though the foregroundremains consistent).It also examines great themes like love (those little hearts) and existentialism ("you is illone").But the essence of the work, called the "gag"panel in this context but akin to a sonnet's final couplet,appearsat the end. Herrimanburststhe illusion of aloneness and privacy,emphasizing our existence in a community. And it's funny, too. Most important,he communicatesthis through a wordless image. Impossible in any other medium, here we see an example of cartoonpoetry in its purest form. The comic-bookcrazethatbegan with the introduction of Supermanin 1938 did about as much harm as good for the medium. While massively popularizingthe comics'language,cheap comic books also commodified it, leading to a stultificationof the form as a mode of personalexpression.It wouldn't begin to develop its full
What Is a Graphic Novel? EDDIECAMPBELL The term graphic novel is currently used in at least four different and mutually exclusive ways. First it is used simply as a synonym for comic books. For instance, I recently read of an "eight-page graphic novel" that I myself once drew. Second, it is used to classify a format - for example, a bound book of comics either in soft- or hardcover - in contrast to the old-fashioned stapled comic magazine. Third, it means, more specifically, a comic-book narrative that is equivalent in form and dimensions to the prose novel. Finally, others employ it to indicate a form that is more than a comic book in the scope of its ambition - indeed, a new medium altogether. It may be added that most of the important "graphic novelists" refuse to use the term under any conditions. In other words, confusion reigns. However, what is clearly observable is that reaching for a new rubric for the medium as it is now practiced coincides with a large shift in aesthetic outlook. The hallmarks of this new position include a respect for the authorial voice, the longing to establish a permanent bookshelf of great works in a popular art that was previously never more than "throwaway," and a deeper sense of the medium's history than previously prevailed. It is my belief that, long before the constituencies of the graphic novel have finished arguing among themselves, the strategies that have been devised for long-range pictorial reading will contribute significantly to an emerging new literature of our times in which word, picture, and typography interact meaningfully and which is in tune with the complexity of modern life with its babble of signs and symbols and stimuli.
March-April 2007 i 13
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware The graphic novel that has set the standard for the genre, ChrisWare's magnum opus follows the comically cruel adventures of a not-very-smart,nolonger-a-kid JimmyCorriganas he searches for his lost father. For more about this title, see page 29.
potential until the 1960s, when a group of West Coast cartoonistsbegan independentlypublishingcomicbooks and selling them "underground"in head shops and record stores. RobertCrumb became the most famous member of this movement. Though he would go on to become comics' most brilliant polytechnic, constantly changingstyles and subjects,his early work remainshis most popularand the closest to what can be called comic poetry. "FreakoutFunnies Presents I'm a Ding Dong Daddy,"a two-pagerthat appearedin the premierissue of Zapin 1967,exemplifiesthe psychedelicizedfree-form style of the undergroundera. Wordless except for the onomatopoeiaof "Snap!""Bonk!"and "Pow!",it depicts a big-footed young man having an epiphany on the street.Ecstatic,his mind blown, he runs around hitting his head against the wall, eventually working himself up into such a cosmic frenzy that he explodes into stars. Capturedin a thoughtbubble,the starsdissolve to emptiness as our man from the beginning returnsto a state of ignorance.Likethe best linguisticpoetry, "DingDong Daddy"uses the comics languageof the past (superhero and gag comics)in radicallynew ways to express something profoundabout the cultureof its time. Thecomicsdidn't begin to emergefrom the "underground" until the 1980s. Raw, a magazine edited by Art Spiegelman and FranchiseMouly, became one of the main factorsin the shift. Emphasizingworks closer
to self-aware "art"than salacious entertainment,Raw asserteditself as comicsfor grown-upsratherthanmerely "adults."Among the many brilliantpieces to have appearedin its pages, RichardMcGuire's"Here"(1989) stands out as one of the most influentialworks of comics poetryever published.Itsmethodof using comicsto split time into multiplelayersthatcanbe readsimultaneously still has the shock of the new. It begins as a pregnant woman stands in her living room and announcesto her husband,"Honey,I thinkit's time."Fixingthe "camera" to the same location,McGuirebegins jumpingback and forth in time by generations,then centuries,then millennia, exploringthe past and futureof a single location in space. He does this in six pages by setting smaller panels inside larger ones, which are all labeled with a year,so one begins to readmultipletimelinessimultaneously, each with its own narrative.Using similaritiesof composition,movement, and language, McGuireties it all togetherinto a fluid comment on the nature of time using a form unique to comics. The youngest comic-book poet of this survey, Anders Nilsen (b. 1973), has been gaining a major reputationamong the comixcenti for his simple, enigmatic,and memorablework. One of his most interesting recentpieces appearedin the excellentbiannualanthology series Mome, published by Fantagraphicsbooks (reprintedhere on pp. 16-23). The fall 2005 issue included
Nilsen's shortwork "Event."Thedesign couldn'tbe simpler. Page 1 contains a single gray square with a black border, the size of a postage stamp, accompanyingthe text, "Whatyou said you would do."On page 2 a slightly smaller squarebroken into quadrantsof differenthues sits over the text "Yourreasonsfor not doing it: stated." Page 3 contains a larger, dun-colored square over the word "Unstated."It continueslike this, using squaresof varying sizes and quantitiesto representtime, people, events, and consequencesaffectedby and resultingfrom this original,unnamed inaction.A comics poem with a twist ending, the last panel switches its core geometry to featurered concentriccircles over the label "Anxiety experiencedevery time you think back to this experience for the rest of your life." While lines like that will not win over any old-schoolpoets, as a whole the work reads as a fascinatinglyclever minimalistvisual poem. The words and pictures are totally dependent on each otherto convey the meaningof the work, which readsas a compressed,playful examinationof regret.In sum, it is a graphicpoem.
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Culturally, at least, serious-minded comic artists have much in common with traditional poets. You could describeeach the same way: an underappreciated authorwho spends years working on a thin volume to be published by a barely surviving independent press for a small, cultlike audience. Until recently,the difference could be measuredin the level of respectaccorded one over the other, at least in the United States.Comic artists,regardlessof their subjectmatter,have traditionally hovered in the artistichierarchysomewhere above
pornographersbut below children'sbook authors.But that seems to be changing.Thereare more comic poets today than at any time before, thanks to the comic medium's explosive growth in the last five years. Like traditionalpoets who work at the cutting edge of the Englishlanguage, these artistscreatethe pathways that otherswill follow. New YorkCity
sounds quixoticto create a book without words, but beginning in the late 1910s, several artists did precisely that. Their books, sometimes called "woodcut novels" or "novels in pictures," don't dispense with character, theme, or plot. Instead of sentences and paragraphs, however, they use a sequence of images (typically executed in a woodcut or wood-engraving technique). The effect is something like a silent film stripped of its intertitles. The genre's most prolific practitioner, the Belgian anarchist Frans Masereel (1889-1972), set the stage for these mostly leftist works. They
Hovel" ..."Woodcut A Forerunner to the Graphic Novel CHRISLANIER
are dramas of class struggle, of the degradation and the thrillof urban life. Masereel in particularhad a visual poetry that lifts his work beyond mere agitprop; his masterpiece, Mon Livred'Heures (1926), fairly vibrates with Whitmanesque metaphysics. The wordlessness of the form abetted its content, allowing the books to traverse the nationalist boundaries of language and even the class boundaries of literacy. The "woodcut novel" became an international enterprise, attracting artists from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Canada, and the United States. The most ambitious "woodcut novelist" in America was LyndWard (1905-85). His first book, Gods' Man, sold quite well, despite being published the week of the 1929 stock market crash. (The ensuing depression era would provide him material for several woodcut novels to come.) The genre became successful enough to spawn its own parody: He Done Her Wrong (1930), by the cartoonist Milt Gross (1895-1953). The main ideology put forth in its story (about a bumpkin woodsman making his way to the Big City) is the polemic of slapstick. In retrospect, the political aims of the "woodcut novel" seem as willfully Utopian as Esperanto. Regardless, its visual rhetoric is still alive and vital in the work of some contemporary graphic novelists, particularlythose of Peter Kuper and Eric Drooker. And the wordless format continues to build bridges between international artists:to mark the year 2000, French comics publisher L'Association released Comix 2000, a compendium of 324 wordless comics stories. The artists hailed from twenty-nine different countries, but between the covers of that book they were all speaking the same tongue.
March-April 2007 i 15
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"event," by anders nilsen
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graphic literature
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"event," by anders nilsen
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From Mome (Fantagraphics,Fall2005) Reprintedby permission of the author
March-April 2007 i 23
wamF^ runsr. STEPHENE. TABACHNICK
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PAST FEW
years, many excellent films have been adapted from equally excellent graphic novels- for instance, MaxCollins'sRoadtoPerdition,John Wagnerand VinceLocke'sA History of Violence,Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta,FrankMiller's Sin City, and Daniel Clowes's Art SchoolConfidential.Several more
films made from graphic novelsincluding an adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's retelling of the Greeks' stand against the Persians at Thermopylae,entitled 300- arealso on the way. Yetanother graphicnovel, Art Spiegelman's Maus, has won the Pulitzer Prize and was the subjectof an exhibition
24 I World Literature Today
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmenhas achieved cult status on university campuses. Is this recent popularity of the graphic novel in Hollywood, with prize and museum committees,on campusesand, it must be added, in chain bookstores, an instant trend that will soon pass, or does it point to a deeper, more lasting shift in our culture? My fifteen years of teachingthis new genre at the university level have provided some hints of an answer to this question. The excitement of newness alone is not very lasting in academe, as elsewhere. But instead of sputtering out like other trendy fireworks,
the graphicnovel has been steadily gaining in brightnessamong audiences both inside and outside the academy.Why? My conclusionsto date, which have not and probably will never pass the test of scientific scrutiny,but which seem sensibleto me, follow. First, it seems to me that the graphicnovel representsthe answer of the book- and people who love to read and make books- to the challenge of the electronic screen, including film, television,the Internet, and video games. Just as the theater's survival was challenged by the rise of film, which led playwrights and theater crews to create new techniques and special
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oppositepageMax Minghellas as Jerome and LaurenLee Smith as Beat Girlin Daniel Clowe's Art School Confidential, right Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition, below
Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harrisin A Historyof Violence. These movies are part of the recent crop of screen adaptations of popular graphic novels.
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effects, so traditional literature and the book medium in which it exists have found a way to combine their strengths with that of painting, anotherthreatenedmedium in the electronicage, and to meet the screen on its largely visual ground while retaining the pleasures and advantages of the book. Literary books can offer depth, subtlety, privacy, and intimacy. They also offeran experiencecontrolledby the reader,who can open and close a book at any time, unlike the film or TV viewer, who must follow a film or televisionshow more or less continuouslywhile it is being screened and finds interruptionsa disservice. Yet the advantagesof the electronic media are many: presentationsin
the electronic media are relatively concise and offer speed of apprehension, are relatively easy on the eyes compared to print (except for some badly illuminated computer screens), include sound, and can portraysuch things as subtle facial expressions and landscapes better than literaturecan. In the form of video games, they also offer interactivity.Whereasthe graphicnovel cannot include sound, it provides many of the advantages of both print and electronic media while creatinga unique and subtle experience all its own (including strikingly letteredindicationsof sound). Whetherwe're dealing with Watchmen (known as the Ulyssesof the graphic novel for its subtlety, sty-
listic variety, philosophical reach, and depth of characterization,and which is much more approachable than Joyce's Ulysses) or Marjane - a starkand harSatrapi'sPersepolis rowing look into what it was like to grow up underthe Shahof Iranand then Khomeini- the graphic novel gives us the subtlety and intimacy we get from good literary books while providingthe speed of apprehension and the excitingly scrambled, hybrid readingexperiencewe get from watching, say, computer screens that are full of visuals as well as text. The graphic novel also provides something else, as Marshall McLuhannoted long ago and Scott McCloud has since reiterated: imaginative interactivity. Comics for McCloud constitute a Zen-like "invisible art," which makes use of the blank spaces, or gutters,that exist between panels and which are the very definition of the unique comics experience. According to McCloud, the reader must fill in these blanks, thus imagining a good deal of the action that takes place in comics. It follows that the mental interactivity of the reader with a graphicnovel is much more pronounced and essential than that which occurs when he or she watches a film or high-definition television, in which there are ordinarily no blank spaces for a reader to fill in imaginatively. Thus, the graphic novel routinely manages to provide a powerful interactive experience that has something in common with the interactivityof even that most interactivegenre of all, the video game. It is auspicious, indeed, for those who value books and reading that the book has managed to offer this new, hybrid form of reading that combines visual with verbal rhetoric, for the screen is a very
March-April 2007i 25
Natalie Portmanas Evey and Hugo Weaving as V in the futuristic thriller V for Vendetta, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd.
powerful competitor- seeming to threaten, at times, the erasure of reading altogether,except perhaps among those people (usually of an older generation)most devoted to it. Even people like myself, who value traditional reading enormously, often find it more appealing to surf the unique blend of text and picture that is the Internet rather than to read a book when sufferinga spell of insomnia.Video games are hypnotic, to judge from the scores of young people playing them devotedly in shopping malls. Television is actually addictive, as several studies have shown. Films provide a great Friday-nightsocial experience.Therefore,it is no wonder that, owing to the impact of these various visual media, from year to year students display less and less patiencewith unillustrated texts, especiallylong ones; teaching Moby Dick or ParadiseLost is now a
job that takes far more persistence, devotion, and flair to performsuc-
26 I World Literature Today
cessfully than was the case in the past. Even with the best teachers, many students cannot now rise to the challenge of reading pure texts. Because of the influence of the electronic screen, that form of reading is slowly being lost, except for a few specialist readers, much like the amateurplaying of classical piano,which is now a vanishingart. The new hybrid visual and verbal reading- different from traditional reading but fortunately no less subtle, intelligent, or, in its way, demanding- is rapidly taking its place. That is why, I believe, English departments- rather than art or communicationsdepartmentsare leading the movement into the teaching and study of the graphic novel. English departments are book-oriented,studentsare reading pure text much less than they used to, and English departments are trying to find a way to reactto this trend in order to ensure their own survival.
It is only honest to admit that even the most motivated readers, whether they are twenty-five or sixty-five, can become physically exhausted when reading pure text in books and staring at those little black marks on white paper for long periods with no visual relief. A long, unillustratedtext takes a long time to read,and many people don't quite have the stamina or, more importantly,the taste for that anymore. They just don't want to put in the time,no matterhow fascinating the book. They wonder why the writercould not have beenmore concise. They want a quick read ratherthan a thicktext,not because they are unintelligentor lazy, but simply because they are used to quick electronic perception. Also, despite all of the cliches written aboutpurelytextualnovels allowing us to imaginecharactersand places, the truthis that most of us who are not visual artistscannotreallyvisualize what a writer is talking about
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when he or she describesa person or physical object;most of us need to see thatpersonor object,and television and films- and graphicnovels- allow us to do just that. (The factthatgraphicnovels are so easily adaptableto othervisual media also partiallyexplainswhy so many talented artistsand writersare drawn to the genre these days.) At the same time, books as a medium are not going away, just as theater survived films. I- and apparentlya lot of other peoplelike to go to bookstores, to hold books, to flip through them, and even to read them while drinking some coffee. There is something special- call it privacy and intimacy- between ourselves and a book that we are not ready to give up. And then there's the fact that books don't black out on us sometimes,as electronicdevices do. The graphicnovel is the ideal evolution of the book in its attempt to adaptto the new electronicage. I do not mean to imply that text-based books will disappear in the foreseeable future, and even Watchmen includes a substantialpiece of pure (and brilliantlywritten) text at the end of each chapter.Nor do I think that Englishdepartmentsare going to stop teachingMelville or Milton in their original, textual versions anytime soon (although there exist terrificgraphic-noveladaptationsof Eliot's WasteLandby MartinRowson and of Kafka's"Metamorphosis" by Peter Kuper). I think textbased books will exist for a long time to come, but I also think that the balancebetween purely textual books and graphicnovels in terms of numbersof readerswill continue to shift in favor of graphic nov-
els. I also predict that the graphic novel will continue to hold its own against the electronic screen and that, if handheld electronic book readers ever prove themselves (as they have so far failed to do), the graphicnovel will be an extremely popularform of readingin that format as well. Whileall this relatesto the technicalreasonthatthe graphicnovel is becoming prevalent today- namely, a diminution of our ability and desire to read straight text, while we retainour taste for the intimacy of the book and find a combination of text and picture very congenial- there is also one primary cultural reason for the emerging triumph of the graphic novel. It is the reason comics were and still are considered childish by many people. In a child's imagination, the line between the physicallypossible and the physically impossible is blurred,as it is in comics, where a man can leap tall buildings in a single bound and creatures may metamorphoseinto other creatures at will. It is very easy for the artist to make the move from the realistic to the fantastic and vice versa in comics; it can be done from one panel to the next or even within one panel. We accept strange transformations in comics; that is perhaps the very essence of the culturalside of the comics experience, running from Lyonel Feininger'sWeeWillie Winkie'sWorldto Shuster and Siegel's Supermanand beyond. (That is why we are able to accept Peter Kuper's superb rendering of Kafka's bug/human character,Gregor Samsa, in Kuper's adaptation of "The Metamorphosis,"so readily.) In short, I feel that the cultural
reason that serious comics seem to appeal to so many readers today is that we are living in a world in which our reality might instantly prove, and often does prove, to be completely differentfrom what we thoughtit was. I happened to be teaching Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta,which ends with the Houses of Parliamentbeing blown up, at the University of Oklahoma around the time when the Alfred P. Murrahbuilding was destroyed by a truckbomb about fifteenmiles north of my classroom.I remember the class and I remarkingthat we were now living in a comic-book world. And many of us have been teaching Watchmen,which details a catastrophicattackon New York City, before and since 9/11. Again, we are living in a comic-book world- that is, a world that seems to partake of the elastic landscape of a comicbook,so readyto explode from mundane realism into a fantasticshape in a second. Mooreand as Gibbons,who created Watchmen that vera serial in 1987-88,prove bal and visual poets can indeed be seers,as the Romansbelieved.(And in a particularlybrilliant observation based on William Burroughs's "cut-up"collage technique,Moore shamanisticallyimplies in chapter 11 that, for the reader, the panels itself are and gutters of Watchmen comparableto the multipletelevision screens that Veidt watches simultaneouslyin orderto discernthe shape of the future,thus turningthe reader into a seer as well.) The world has caught up with Mooreand Gibbonsand has become as outlandish as the virtual world they describe.Moore'sfantasticplot
March-April 2007 1TJ
in Watchmen, in particular,and its elastic renderingin comics seem to duplicateour own explosiveexperience betterthan any other medium does. No wonder Art Spiegelman found it so possible to render his personal9/11 experiencein a graphic novel, In the Shadowof No Towers,or
that Sid Jacobsonand Ernie Colon have just turned the 9/11 commission reportinto a graphicnovel, The Illustrated 9/11 Commission Report.
Theelasticityof comicsmakesJacobson and Colon's adaptation more apt,moresuitedto our sense of how "unreal"the Twin Towers events were,thanthe 9/11 reportitself.And theiradaptationhas a diagrammatic quality that makes these fantastic events easier to read about and to understandthan might be possible in prose alone. A comic-book-like incident, planes deliberatelyflying into the Twin Towers,has actually becomea comicbook.Thenew comic book makes 9/11 no more or less "real"than it was; it just fits those eventsnaturally,or so it seems. But the comic-booknovel is of our times not only becausemany of today'seventsaretruly"fantastic" that is, horrificand unexpected.The elasticity of the comic-booknovel also allows it to bringout the fantastic element inherent- but not often noticed- in mundane reality. One of my (and many of my students7) favoritegraphicnovels is Raymond Briggs'sEthelandErnest.Briggsis one of the premiercontemporaryBritish illustratedchildren'sbook creators. His Father Christmasand The Snow-
manhave sold many,manycopiesto parentseager to show and tell these
28 I World Literature Today
illustratedstories to their children. Etheland Ernestis a serious, subtle, and gentle biographyof his parents and also an accountof Britishhistory fromcirca1930(whentheyweremarried)to 1971,the year in which both died. We watch as Etheland Ernest move through a life made difficult by the Depressionand the Blitzand to them thenmadeincomprehensible after World social change by rapid War II. Despite this seriousnessof subject and purpose, however, the charactersare rendered in gentle, slightly blurredand dreamy colors. Theproseis simple,relativelysparse, and limited to dialogue. The word balloons swell from small, smooth, and regular to jagged, large, and full of emphasis.The world of Ethel and Ernest,renderednostalgicallyby theirson despiteits manydifficulties, becomesa fairy-talelandscapeinhabitedby a noble(ifsometimessilly and ignorant)queen and king, although Briggs never directly refers to his parentsas such.He has takenhis and his parents'mundaneand sometimes not-so-mundanerealityand brought out all of its inherentmagic,thus collapsingtheboundarybetweenreality and fantasy.In short, Briggs'sbook is reallya children'sbook for adults, and his intentionseemsto be to comfortus, justas childrenarecomforted by a gentlytold tale. Whetherit deals primarilywith fantasy or with reality,the graphic novel is a formsuitedto the contemporaryage because of its appeal to our newly learned sense that reality can very quicklybecomefantasy, and vice versa,as well as its unique and comfortingcombinationof the
The comic-book novel is of our times not only becausemany of today'sevents are truly "fantastic*that is, horrific and unexpected.The elasticity of the comic-book novel also allows it to bring out the fantastic element inherent - but not often noticed - in mundanereality. qualities of both book and screen. If we add the enormouspopularity of Japanesemanga with American preteens,as well as the remembered comfort inherent in the illustrated children'sbooks with which we are all familiar,to the present impetus toward reading sophisticatedcomics, I contend that the graphicnovel will continue to displace (if never completely replace) purely textual writing and that it will eventually become the most popular form of reading. That is because I think that, fortunately or unfortunately, we will watch reality and fantasy morph into each other many, many times in our collective lives in the years to come, not always pleasantly. The good news is that the graphic novel now offers just as many fine creative talents- and as subtle, plastic, and wonderful a readingexperience- as any literary genre ever has done. Universityof Memphis
ANDREWD. ARNOLD
Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes A monumental work of historicalfiction focusing on Weimar-era Berlin,Lutes's projected three-volume series is already ten years in the making and only half done. This first volume, which reads as a complete story, focuses on the intersecting lives of an American art student and a jaded, leftwing newspaper reporter. Taking its visual style from the detail of European comics, the finished series will be one of the major graphic works of the past twenty years. Buddha, by Osama Tezuka Comics made in Japan are called manga, and the principalcreator of their indigenous style is Tezuka (1928-89). Famous in the United States for Astro Boy, the prolificTezuka also created this eight-volume, highly fictionalized biography of the great spiritualleader. As profane as it is pro-
cross-cutting technique, marks Clowes's most sophisticated use of the form yet.
to the central Buddhisttheme: all life is sacred.
The graphic novel that has set the standard for
sappy story to create a masterwork of comic art. The black-and-white drawings marrythe real with the spiritual- at one point the epilepsy is depicted as a snakelike demon, contorting its victim- to create a work that explores history, human relationships, and the meaning of art.
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latest graphic novel, focusing on the intermingled lives of a warped suburbia using an Altmanesque
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
oir of growing up with an older brother who suffers from epilepsy transcends a potentially
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to be one of comics' most acidic creators. This
found, with a surprisingamount of humor for a "religious"book, Tezuka nevertheless stays true
Epileptic, by David B. Originallypublished in France, David B.'s mem-
o
Ice Haven, by Daniel Clowes While gaining a reputation for writing tart, independent screenplays {Ghost World,Art School Confidential), here's hoping Clowes will continue
the genre, ChrisWare's magnum opus follows the comically cruel adventures of a not-verysmart, no-longer-a-kid Jimmy Corriganas he searches for his lost father. Though it requires a very high level of comics reading skill, it rewards the reader with some of the most inventive uses of the form yet seen. Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District, by Ben Katchor Originallyappearing in weekly alternative newspapers, this collection of strips captures the ineffable qualities of urban living. Katchorcreates a world that never was, but should have been, of street-side mustard dispensers, radiator musicians, and misspent youth centers. One cannot help but be enchanted by the false nostalgia of these brief comic poems.
8
March-April 2007 i 29
The Robert Crumb Handbook, by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski An artist working at his craft for over forty years, Robert Crumb's contribution to comics and popular culture cannot be overstated. This book, a collaborative effort that includes Crumb's oral history of his career and artistry,works as the most succinct overview of the master's significant oeuvre. Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco The comics' version of Edward R. Murrow, Louis Riel, by Chester Brown Chester Brown, one of several important comics makers from Canada, takes on one of his country's unique heroes in this major work of slightly fictionalized history. Riel, a revolutionaryand
intifada in Palestine, his second book, Safe Area Gorazde, brought him to the Balkansduring the 1990s. Collecting the oral histories of those who made it through the siege of Gorazde, Sacco
mystic of the nineteenth century, led the French/ Indian population of what became Saskatchewan
visualizes the events that would otherwise have
in a failed demand for sovereignty. Working with
lived only in people's memories.
themes of madness, religious ecstasy, and the corruption of power, Brown balances this serious work of intense research by drawing in a style reminiscent of newspaper gag strips. Maus, volumes 1-2, by Art Spiegelman Arguably the most import work of graphic literature ever written, the PulitzerPrize-winning Maus books launched the form into the rarefied air of
Adventures of Tintin, by Herge LikeJapan's Osamu Tezuka, the influence of Herge on Europe'scomic style cannot be overestimated. Originallypublished in Belgium and France,the adventures of Tintin,a globetrotting "reporter,"and his dog, Snowy, have been translated into every major language and continue to enchant children and adults with their wonderful
academics and historians. A masterful work of Holocaust biography- the author illustrateshis
characters and detailed graphics.
father's story of survival- it's the one work of
Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud The only truly successful book-length comics essay, McCloud's deeply influential 1993 book
graphic literaturethat everybody knows, and its reputation is well deserved. One! Hundred! Demons!, by Lynda Barry A longtime weekly strip artist ("ErniePook's Comeek"), Barrycreated this book as an amalgam of childhood memoir with outright fiction. Told as a series of vignettes, Barryhas an uncanny total recall of what it was like to be an adolescent. Everyconfusing, awkward, and infuriating moment has been illustratedin caustically funny ways. Persepolis I, by Marjane Satrapi The first of a projected three-volume series (the second has already been released) recounts the author's life as child in Tehran during the early years of the Ayatollah's revolution. With simple graphics and a compelling narrative,it pulls back the veil on a world seldom seen and even less understood.
30 I WorldLiteratureToday
Sacco specializes in reportorialnonfiction from the world's war zones. After covering the first
provided the world with a real vocabularyto discuss the medium as an intellectual pursuit. Brilliantlywritten in comics style for even the most novice comics reader, this book remains invaluable for anyone interested in the mechanics of the language of comics- or who just wants to better understand what makes them so special. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Strictlya writer, Moore straddles the line between "artistic"and "commercial"comics better than any other creator in the medium. Author of From Hell and League of ExtraordinaryGentlemen, Moore's Watchmen, aided by the brilliant artwork of fellow BritDave Gibbons, deconstructs
I i
the superhero for an audience that includes more than geeks.
I
Artist
Profile
Jessica Abel
t
I
I <
~~'^
^-
•-
- <*^ orn in Chicago in 1969, Jessica Abel starting creating comics while she was a student at the University of Chicago. After graduating in 1992, she won a contest to appear in Peter Bagge's Hate comic series, which included a chance to meet the artist. Four years later, Abel won a Xeric grant and put out the first full-size and professionally printed issue of Artbabe,attracting the attention of Fantagraphics editor Gary Groth. In 1997 she began a new volume of Artbabefor Fantagraphics and won the "Best New Talent" Harvey and Lulu awards. Abel counts WonderWomanand Vfor Vendettaamong her earliest influences but says it wasn't until she read Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rocketsthat her conception of what comics are and can be was formed. While Abel says her comics do not have a feminist agenda, she is a passionate and declared feminist and allows her views to inform her writing. Her latest novel, La Perdida,won the 2002 "Best New Series" Harvey Award. In 2007 Abel plans to release a young-adult novel, Carmina. She is also working on a textbook about creating comics with her husband and fellow cartoonist, Matt Madden.
soloctcMlworks Radio:An IllustratedGuide,with Ira Glass (1999) Mirror, Window:An ArtbabeCollection(2000) Soundtrack:Short Stories 1989-1996 (2001) La Perdida(2006) Compilations of Artbabe,vol. 2, nos. 1-4 (1997-99) A revised compilation of La Perdida,nos. 1-5 (2001-5) Compiledby OlubunmiIshola
March-April 2007 131
Lynda Barry LyndaBarrywas born on January2, 1956,in RichlandCenter,Wisconsin,but grew up in Seattle. She attended EvergreenState College, where she met TheSimpsonscreatorMatt Groening,a lifelong friend who first published Barry'swork without her knowledge. Barry,the daughter of a half-Filipinomother and a white father,draws upon her mixed heritageas inspirationfor her work, which focuses on lower-classfamily life. Her criticallyacclaimedillustratednovel The GoodTimesAreKillingMe, which was made into a play that appearedat the SecondStage,won the WashingtonStateGovernor'sAward,and her criticallyacclaimedsecondnovel, Cruddy,was describedby the New YorkTimesas "a work of terriblebeauty"and named one of the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Quarterly Weekly.Barry'swork has appearedin McSweeney's Concernand Tin House and has been anthologized in The Best AmericanNonrequiredReading2003,
edited by Dave Eggers, and TheBestAmericanComics2006, guest edited by Harvey Pekar.In additionto graphicnovels, Barryhas createda coloringbook entitledNakedLadies!NakedLadies! NakedLadies!and an audio recording,TheLyndaBarryExperience. Barryhas taught numerous in on the novel at the Institute Rhinebeck,New York, and The workshops graphic Omega in Crossing Austin, Texas. Her many hobbies include embroidery,hooking rag rugs, reading about insects and undersea life, gardening, and visiting South Dakota. Before she became a vegetarian,Barrypreferredchickenadobo ratherthan pork adobo.
From One Hundred Demons, by LyndaBarry.Artwork © 2002 by LyndaBarry.Reproduced by permission of Sasquatch Books. $17.95 paper, isbn1-57061-459-8
32 I World Literature Today
graphicliterature
Comics
Adaptationsof
Literary
Classics
The tradition of comics adaptations began in the 1940s, with Albert Lewis Kanter's Classics Illustrated series, which now includes over 150 titles adapted from literary classics. Some more recent adaptations include: O Alienista (2007; The alienist), by Fabio Moon (Machado de Assis) Animal Farm:A Fairy Story (1996), by Ralph Steadman (George Orwell) City of Glass: The GraphicNovel (1994, rev. 2004), by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli (Paul Auster) DesolationJones (2006), by Warren Ellis (based on The Big Sleep,by Raymond Chandler) Dr. Jekylland Mr. Hyde (2002), by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky (Robert Louis Stevenson) TheFifth Name (2001), by Santiago Cohen (Stefan Zweig) Give It Up! and Other Stories (2005), by Peter Kuper (Franz Kafka) Gravity'sRainbowIllustrated:One Picturefor Every Page (2006), by Zak Smith (Thomas Pynchon) Jetlag(2006), by Etgar Keret and Actus Comics (Etgar Keret) TheJungle (2005), by Peter Kuper (Upton Sinclair) TheMetamorphosis(2004), by Peter Kuper (Franz Kafka) Pizzeria Kamikaze(2006), by Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka (Etgar Keret) Poor Sailor (2005), by Sammy Harkham (Guy de Maupassant) Remembranceof Things Past: Combray(2001), by Stephane Heuet (Marcel Proust) Remembranceof Things Past: Within a Budding Grove(2003), by Stanislas Brezet & Stephane Heuet (Marcel Proust) In 2006 several comics writers published novels about literary authors, books, and characters. TheTimesofBotchan,by Natsuo Sekigawa and Jiro Taniguchi, is about the creation of the novel Botchan,by Natsume Soseki. Left Bank Gang, by Jason, is an original work with noted authors for characters, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Joyce. Illustrated as dogs and birds, they live in a bohemian Paris and are cartoonists by trade. Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie recently completed Lost Girls, an erotic novel about Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,Dorothy Gale from The WizardofOz, and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. Compiledby ArmandoCelayo& David Shook
Lvudfi linrry: Scl(H*t
March-April 2007 133
Boiled f^&ddtld and
-£h& ROB VOLLMAR
NEARLYEVERYREGIONaround
the
world enjoys its own domestic brand of visual storytelling, there are three contemporarytraditionsthat can be set apart as either the source of or secondaryinfluence on all the others- namely, bandedessinee(Franco-Belgian), comics (English),and manga(Japanese).Despite the geographicand culturalisolationthatallowed each to develop essentiallyuninfluencedif not completelyunawareof the others,all threetraditionsfollowed a parallelcontour of development from being a medium associated with disposablenovelty at the dawn of the twentiethcentury to one already commandingthe stage as a vibrant and literaryform in the emergenttwenty-first. In the past two decades, however, the ethnocentripetal forces that kept each particular tradition isolated to its zone of influence have been eroded by the social and economictrends commonly thought of as globalization.The recent explosion of awareness about graphicnovels in the United States,in particular,can be attributedto heavy lifting by all three traditionsin tandem as evidencedby the criticaland commercialsuccess enjoyed by such disparate works as MarjaneSatrapi's Persepolis, CraigThompson'sBlankets,and RumikoTakahashi's Inu Yasha,among many, many others. As these
34 I World Literature Today
respective markets have drifted unmistakably closer over the past twenty years, the impulse to cross-pollinate both creatively and economicallybetween them has provenequallyirresistible.One such effort,Nouvelle Manga,aligns like-mindedcreatorsof bandedessinee(bd) and mangaunder one conceptualbanner. Its architect, creator,and critic, FredericBoilet, founded the movement in 2001 and has since orchestratedthe publication of an impressive array of work originating primarily from Franceand Japanin over nine differentlanguages. de BD during Boiletmade his debut as a dessinateur the early 1980s. While the French market at the time was dominated by meticulously illustrated sciencefiction and fantasy stories, Boilet found himself more at home during the 1990swhen a confederationof smaller album publishers, most specializing in autobiographical material, re-ignited the general public interest in bandesdessinees.As early as 1990,he traveledto Japanto researchLoveHotel,a collaborativegraphicalbum with writer Benoit Peeters.Three years later, Boilet received the MorningMangafellowship fromJapanesepublisher Kodanshaand spent a year in Tokyo as one of the first Westernersinvited to learn the craft of making manga directlyfrom the Japanese.Though Boiletwould return to France,the impactof his extendedstay in Japanon his
graphic literature
I s
I I
work is profound.A carefulstudy of LoveHotelreveals a numberof stylistic tendencies that would not survive this early period. Boilet regularly invests his considerable draftingabilities on complexifyingbackgrounds,a practicewell in line with the illustration-intensivework of the period.His page layouts can also be seen as trending toward the conservativeelements of the traditionin which he is working, reflecting storytelling strategies long since codified by the time that Boilet is coming to them. In contrast,Boilet's next book, TokyoIs My Garden (publishedin 1997and 1998in Franceand Japanrespectively), unveils the narrative and visual blueprint for the artist's work to come. Completed in collaboration again with Peeters but also including mangaartist Jiro Taniguchi,Tokyois an ambitious experimentthat willfully bridges the visual gap implied by the distinction between bandedessineeand manga.Boilet's own pages often reflecta new organizingprinciple,a six-panelgrid that soberly divides up a discretemoment from a fixed perspective.Boilet,who extensivelyutilizes photographic reference,drawsupon the familiarityof seeing through the journalist'seye to empowerhis autobiographicaltendencies with rich detail and thematicgravity.Returning to Tokyo in 1997, Boilet would undertakethe unprec-
fr&de.ri£ Boil et March-April 2007 135
Kazuichi
^Jaiacoa
CfitcD7~ar)iauchi
36 I WorldLiteratureToday
graphic literature
edented in establishingmarketsfor publishinghis work in Japan.Though his next fully realized graphic novel, Yukiko'sSpinach,would take over three years to serialize and complete,he createdand placed a considerable number of other shorterpieces with a variety of manga magazines.Given the appetite for mangain Japan,each new successgrantedBoiletaccessto a domesticaudience ranginganywherein size from one hundredthousandto five million readers. The completed editions of Yukiko'sSpinachwere simultaneouslyreleasedin Franceand Japanin 2001and markedthe beginning of a particularlyambitiousleg of its author'scareer.In Septemberof thatsame year,Boilet organized the first Nouvelle Manga event. In conjunction with the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and several nearby art galleries, Boilet and an eclectic mix of bandedessineeand mangaartists (also known as mangaka) presentedtheirwork to the public.In an essay thatwas includedin the show's program,Boilet articulatesfor the first time the meaning and purpose of the Nouvelle Manga movement to come. Opening with an in-depthdiscussionof the traditionaldifferences between mangaand bandedessinee,Boiletmakesan essential distinctionbetween the impulses that motivate the artistscreatingthem, noting that "inJapan,a mangakais someonewho wants, above all, to tell stories,as opposed to those authorsof bandesdessinees,'BDs'in France,who generally come into their craft through an interest in drawing/'1 Boilet furtherdistinguishes what he considers traditional 'BDs' and Nouvelle BD, the term he offers to describe the small-pressrevolution of which he was a part in France.Like bandedessinee,manga,he notes, also has its own commercialsector that is largely incompatible with the other traditionsdue to the insulated and highly stylized visual storytellingtechniquesthat typify it. This type of manga,despite its popularityinternationally, only represents a portion of the total output of Japan'sdomestic industry. The rest, like Nouvelle BD, arerooted,at least in the rhythmsof autobiographyif not always its form, and share a common value of prioritizing the believabledepictionof everyday life. In a more recentpiece entitled "NouvelleMangain 2006,"Boilet succinctly recalls his reasoning in pairing work from these particular authors together, despite theirculturaldifferences,observingthat while certainformattedand targetedseries, which featurethe tricksand characteristics of each 'genre/ are aimed specificallyat the fans of manga,comics
or BD,the work of such innovatorsas Japan'sKiriko from Nananan{Blue),AdrianTomine{Summer Blonde) can most the U.S.or France'sFabriceNeaud {journal) likely be appreciatedby readersof mangaas well as those of comicsor BD. ... In reality,the borderline that divides the commercialgraphicnovel from the graphicnovel d'auteurseems more significantthan that between manga,comics,and BD. It is this connivanceand the consciousnessof the universalityof the graphicnovel d'auteurthat the Nouvelle Manga movementseeksto express.2 One of the greatest strengths of Nouvelle Manga as it has developed since 2001 is the flexibilityit offers the creatorsaligned with the movement. The aesthetic describedin the Manifestois simple and broad enough ("comicsd'auteurthat are adult and universal,thatspeak of men and women and their daily life") to cultivate a diverse batch of releasesfor each participatinglanguage base.3While these aims do enjoy a pragmatismassociated with the acquisitionof new marketsfor often proven material,they also ably push the creativemomentumof the movement toward the substantiveand, often, literary. In emphasizing the naturallyoccurringsimilarities between particularsegments of both the bandedessinee and mangatradition,Nouvelle Manga is able to draw upon pre-existing Nouvelle BD of exceptional quality from authorslike David B and JoannSfarto tap essentially untouchedmarketsin Japan. Conversely, it is also used to round out and, in some cases, rehabilitatethe impressionof mangain the West through the export of substantivework from veteran mangakalike KazuichiHanawa and JiroTaniguchi. The complementaryadvantagesof the Nouvelle Manga strategy for authors from both marketsare compelling. The dessinateursde BD, who for the most part will not self-identifytheirwork as anythingbut BD domestically, still gain access to the otherwise impervious Japanese market (which is the feeder for the rest of East Asia) by virtue of their thematic commonalitieswith Boilet's own BD-mangahybrid. The mangaka,many of whom are not activelyengaged in the commercialmangasector and, thus, exemptedfrom the tall dollarsthat sometimes accompany it, gain an important sense of community with other non-traditionalmangacreators in Japan as well as foreignmarketsto help subsidize the production of new work. An equally vital segment of Nouvelle Manga's output is made up of younger mangakathat have been discovered and cultivatedby Boilet. In 2003, artistKan
March-April 2007 137
graphic literature
Kas? 'TakaJncvyia
saw the completionof FredericBoilet'smost ambitious project to date, Japanas Viewed by SeventeenCreators.
Theintroductionto the book is an e-mailfromBoilet to one of the French contributors,Etienne Davodeau, wherein he describesthe projectmore succinctlythat it could be paraphrased. Within the frameworkof a projectfor a collective album,currentlynamedJapan,the FrenchInstitutes and Alliancesin Japanhave come togetherto invite eightFrenchcomiccreatorsto visit. . . . Theworkwill bring togethereight short stories by eight Frenchspeakingauthorswill be invitedto visit eightcitiesin Japan We'reaskingthe visitingauthorsto createa ten-to sixteen-pagestoryin blackand white- fiction, - aroundthe place,town,or chronicle,autobiography areato which they are invited.TheJapaneseauthors and myselfwill createstoriesaroundthe placewhere we live, ourneighborhoodsor, in the caseof the Japanese, theirnativecountry.6 It is not hyperbole to suggest that the seventeen creatorsthat Boilet brings under the Nouvelle Manga bannerfor this publicationrepresenta startlingpercent-
age of the world's finest narrativeartists. Despite the widely divergent approaches on display throughout, the editorialrestraintsharmonizeeven the most eclectic pieces with the rest of the collection.The visiting French artists,in particular,share a numberof common factors (the limited time span of theirvisit, a typhoon thatvisits the island, the culture shock of being abroad)that only underscoremoreboldly the flexibilitythat can be coaxed from autobiographyas a form. It does not hinder their cause, of course, that many of these particularcreators were fundamentalplayers in the autobiographicalrevolution thatbegan in the 1990s(and continuesto this day) and have been honing their craft,one might say, almost in preparationfor a projectjust like this one for, in some cases, twenty years or more. The Japanese contributorsmake up a more heterogeneous group than their French counterpartsand can be distinguished into essential three groups. The first is made up of mangakalike Taniguchiand Hanawa who have been making mangafor decades but recently have enjoyed the benefits of working within the Nouvelle Manga structure as their work, both old and
March-April 2007 139
new, finds new audiences abroad. Second are the younger mangaka like Takahama, Little Fish, and Daisuke Igarashi, who often see their involvementin the movement as an extension to and improvement upon theirparticipationin the avant-gardemangasector. The last is perhaps the most importantas it seems to representa new development for the group. Moyoko Anno and Taiyo Matsumoto have both experiencedconsiderablesuccess in the commercialmangasector, both
in Japanand abroad.The leap from commercial to Nouvelle mangais no doubt a shorter one for these two particularartists,both of whom imbue an idiosyncratic quality to theirwork, than for othersworking in these stylized markets. Still, as the anthologyis able to incorporate otherwise marketableauthors with the range necessary to harmonize with its goals, its chances of being accepted by a broader range of readersare improved.
Due to Boilet's editorial and artistic input, Japan as Viewed by Seventeen Creatorsstands as a com-
pelling document to the vitality of the ideas containedwithin the Nouvelle Manga experiment.In showcasing some of the most forwardlooking artists from two of three dominant narrative art traditions, Japanpaints a comprehensivepicture of the possibilities contained within those traditionswhile offering enough limiting factorsto keep the collection as a whole cohesive,
Autho
Joe Sacco Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. The following year, his fam-
Sacco traveled around the world from 1988 to 1992, during
ily moved to Australia before settling in Portland, Oregon, in 1972. Sacco received his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon
which time he produced six issues of his own comic book, Yahoo, for Fantagraphics Books. Sacco then spent a couple of months
in 1981. Two years later, he returned to Malta and published his
with a rock band in Europe, documenting
first professional cartooning work - a series of romance comics.
I Like It (2006). He also drew record sleeves and posters for Ger-
In 1985,
newspaper.
back to Portland, Sacco co-edited
man record labels and concert promoters in Berlin. In late 1991
Portland Permanent Press, the monthly comics
and early 1992, he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories. Combining his journalistic and storytelling abilities,
after moving
and co-published
He moved to Los Angeles
in 1986 and worked for
Fantagraphics Books. There, he edited the news section for the Comics Journal and created the satirical comic magazine Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy \
40 I World Literature Today
their experiences in But
Sacco produced Palestine in 1993, a quarterly serialization which received the prestigious American Book Award in 1996.
graphic literature
despite the culturaldifferencesthat distinguish if not separate the two groups. By the end of 2006, Japan will be available in seven different editions worldwide and will no doubt serve as an able ambassador in thesenew marketsfor moreNouvelle Mangaworks to be translated and published. If this trend continues, it is only a matterof time until the Americancomicsmarket,which featuresits own Comics Nouveaux (a fact to which Boilet alludes in mentioning Adrian Tomine in his
speech quoted above), becomes the final melting pot into which the world's literarynarrativeart traditions will blend into a wholly new traditionof its own. Norman, Oklahoma
Author note: Special thanks to Elie Abou-Nassar and Zachary Francks for their aid in facilitating this global conversation. 1 Frederic Boilet, "Manifeste de la Nouvelle Manga/' tr. Olivier Petit-
pas & Ken Hollings, 2001, www. boilet.net. 2 Frederic Boilet, "Nouvelle Manga en 2006 . . ." tr. FredericBoilet, 2006, www.boilet.net. 3 Frederic Boilet, "Manifeste de la Nouvelle Manga," 2001. 4 Kan Takahama,e-mail interview, tr. Zachary Francks,September 2006. 5 Little Fish, e-mail interview, tr. Zachary Francks,September 2006. 6 Frederic Boilet, ed., introduction to Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators
(Madrid: Ponent Mon/Fanfare,
2006), 3.
Profile
From Safe Area: Gorazde, Sacco's reflection on the Bosnian conflict.
Following the success of Palestine's publication, Sacco wrote a short story, "Christmaswith Karadzic,"that appeared in Zero Zero 15, an alternative comics anthology. In 1995 Sacco traveled to Sarajevoand the surrounding areas, where he started his book
1 o
I
Safe Area: Gorazde (2000), which addresses the political issues surrounding the Bosnian conflict. In 1998 Details magazine's comix editor Art Spiegelman commissioned Sacco to cover the Bosnian War Crime Trials. Following that, Sacco was sent on tour with the great Mississippian blues musician R. L. Burnsidefor a second strip.
In 2001 Sacco received a Guggenheim fellowship to help pursue his work. He later published The Fixer (2003), another of his graphic journalism pieces on Bosnia, and became a staff cartoonist for the Washington Monthly in 2004 for a year, creating two-page satirico-politicalstrips. More recently, he has been working on a book about the southern Gaza Stripcalled Footnotes in Gaza (forthcoming). A comic story about Chechen refugees in Ingushetia was published in / LiveHere, a 2006 anthology. Compiled by Ling Chuan-Yao
March-April 2007 i 41
aii
Interview
witi^A \~V"~
FabioMoaaX «
DAVID SHOOK
David Shook You both graduated with degrees in plastic arts- how did you become interested in the graphic novel? When did you start creatingthem yourselves?
FabioMoon We always knew we wanted to createcomics,even beforegoing to college. At the end of the 1980s, we first discovered Will Eisner'swork, and his stories of ordinarylife had a great influence on us. So did a Brazilian cartoonistnamed Laerte,who also told stories set in urban settings. His hometown is our hometown, so we were amazed at how well we could relate to the environmentof his stories. Those kinds of stories, ones that we were used to finding in literature,were the ones that made us see how comics can also reflectthe world we live in, not just createa world with superpowersand heroes in tights. By high school, we knew that that was what we wanted to do. We collaboratedwith the school's newspaperas illustrators,and afterthe newspaper shut down we created an independent comics-only fanzine our senioryear. It was the firsttime we realizedthat,when exposed to our comics, people who don't usually read comics notice the story more than the art. In college we became much more criticalabout our art, about what it meant to createimages and symbols and about how we had incorporatedall that had come beforeus into our work. Thathelped us find the best graphicway to tell our stories.
DS Could you explain your process of collaboration?
I:MEverystory startsas an idea that gets stuckin eitherone of our minds or a sensationthat lingers aftersome real-lifeexperience.We share that sensation, thatidea, with each other,to see what lingerswith both of us. We bounceideas back and forthuntil we thinkwe have a story.The kind of storywe createand its tone will determinewhich one of us will be the artist.Afterwe've decided who will draw it, we write the dialogues and startimagining the scenes. We
42 I World Literature Today
don't write full scripts with detailed explanationsof each panel. That is the challengewe leave for whoever is drawing.We have differentstyles,but both of us use the same approachwhen creatinga page. We want to guide the reader'seye through the panels, through the pages. We want to make sure that their eyes travelwhere they should and stop when we want them to. •< < O
2 <
I Q
o z o <
DS Fabio,you have said you don't consideryourself an artistbut a storyteller.Do you consideryour work to be part of a greater storytelling tradition?
FM I think that for me, the most importantaspect of my work is the story. I want to tell stories and I want people to read them. I use images to tell stories- they are the language in which I write. It's the mixtureof two languages- images and words- that makesthe comicbook and the graphicnovel. As much effortas I put into the art,it's all so that the artbecomes invisibleto the readerwho, afterhaving read the work, will rememberthe story as a whole and not just as a seriesof drawings.Thebest partof telling a story as a graphic novel is having people tell you which scene they liked the best when that scene doesn't exist. I never drew it. It's a scene thathappenedbetween panels, but it happenednevertheless.It'sas importantas the scenesI did draw.Stories are told to reflectthe world we live in, to createa recordof the times, dreams, hopes, and dramasof people. That'swhat I read in books, and that'swhat I want to do in comics.
March-April 2007 i 43
DS What do you considerto be the graphicstory's relationshipto more traditionalforms of literature?
FM I think that the beginning of the graphic story relates to the origins of literature:they began as stories told to the masses. As such, the same devices were used. The artists created chaptersand establishedweekly or monthly doses for readers.But just as writers wanted to createmore complex stories than the ones in pulp periodicals,so did the artists.So they startedexploring other aspectsof the graphicstory. Nonlinearways of drawing and telling stories createdmuch more complex graphic stories, using images in ways that were not obvious and not always literal.I relatecomics to poetry,becausepoetry uses words to express more than what they mean, and comics do the same with images. In fact, when we combineimages and words, we can say somethingwith words and show somethingcompletelydifferent.Only when the two areput togethercan we understandthe story, the feelings and intentionsof the characters.
DS How does the Braziliancomic industry compare with that of the United States?
Gabriel Ba Comics from all parts of the world are published here. We've always have had a very close relationshipwith European comics. Superhero comics have strongsales. The Braziliancomics are mainly humorous,an inheritancefrom the long years of censorshipthat the countrywent through two decades ago. With the exceptionof Mauriciode Souza and his children's comics empire, Brazilianauthors are mainly independent or underground, with small printruns of two thousandcopies that sit on the shelves for years. Unableto make a living makingcomics,authorsdo it for pure passion for the craftbut also need othermeans of paying the bills.
DS After ten years of publishing in Brazil, your first widespread U.S. release, De:Tales,was released by Dark Horse in 2006. Brazilian cityscapes backdrop most of the book's short stories. Cities seem to inspire many graphic storytellers. Seth's Canadian cities, Yoshihiro Tatsumi'sTokyo, and JessicaAbel's MexicoCity arejust three examples. How importantis the concept of the Braziliancity to your collection of stories?
FM Big cities have a lot of layers- differentbuildings, differentneighborhoods, differentjobs, differentpeople. All those differencescreate multiple story possibilities,as you are constantlyin contactwith all kinds of people in all kinds of situations.You can really experiencethe complexityof human existence and see how everyone is different.Also, once you've encountered such distinctcharacters,you startto see how very similarwe all are.We like to tell storieswith layers,so we can have somethingfor everyone.Sincewe've lived our entire lives in big cities, setting our stories there is the most natural way of doing that.
DS Reviewers in the United States have commented that your work contains elements of magical realism. Are the magical realists a conscious influence? Who are your otherinfluences?
FM I don't think magical realism is a conscious influence, but I think we come from the same place. Strangethings happen all the time in ordinarylife. There'sbeauty in the strangeness,and it's something not easily explained. Magical realism depicts problems and dramas we all know, yet characters who have problems manage to be happy, to find love, and to touch people over the course of their lives. Insteadof showing how sad people with problems are, we show how happy people are despite their problems.There is somethingmagicalabout this capacityof the human race to overcomeeverything bad that surroundsus. Most of the time, the strangethings in our stories did happen, and the stuff that seems real is fiction.I thinkthe most important thing is that whateverhappens must feel real, and sometimesthe most magical things feel very real.Othertimes, they are.
44 I World Literature Today
Machadode Assis, GuimaraesRosa,and JorgeAmado areBrazilianinfluences. They always show a strangereality,with a lot of problemsand incredibly interestingcharacters.The way Portuguesewriter FernandoPessoa conveys emotions with words is also an influence.We like Shakespearebecause his plays were so well constructed,like complicatedpuzzles where you see the pieces come together.The way he bent languageto tell his storiesis fabulous, too. Another puzzle-solver is Arthur Conan Doyle, with his Sherlock Holmes stories. I love those, and I think about my stories as puzzles mostly becauseof Shakespeareand Doyle. CharlesDickensand HermanMelvilletold incredibletales about ordinarypeople. I think they sharewhat we like about Will Eisner's,just like Machadode Assis and GuimaraesRosa. Dostoyevsky writes beautifully,and he createsthe most interesting,sad characters. DS You both speak English,but do you write your storiesin English?
( ,!> We have been speaking and readingin Englishfor a long time now. We feel confidentenough tq write our stories in English,simply because we can hear our charactersspeakingnaturallyin our heads. The sentencescome alive in English. Sometimesit is easier creatinga dialogue in English than Portuguese, because we have been readingAmericancomics and seeing American movies all our lives. We hear voices in our heads, and, a lot of times, they speakin English.Fabiois learningFrenchand we can manageto communicate in Spanish,but we don't yet trust ourselves to write in eitherlanguage.
DS Could you describeany current projects?
We I \ 1 We'reslowly workingon new storiesfor a second volume of De:Tales. have already completed the first story, which is forty-eightpages long. We have the scriptof the second one ready,but since we're workingon otherprojects we'll startdrawing that one next year. I'm currentlyadaptinga Machado de Assis book into a graphic novel. It's called O Alienista.It's a great story about a doctorwho decided to cure madness in the middle of the nineteenth century in a small town in Brazil,before psychoanalysiswas invented. The craziest things happen when he starts to determine the differencebetween what makes a person crazy and what makes anothersane. Sao Paulo
March-April 2007 i 45
"bag of mice/' by nick flynn & josh neufeld
\ dreamt yoiAr stickle note, was scrawled m 9«noU on 3 brown paperbscj.
& \n "Vhebag vAiereSix baby mice* The ba^ opened irrtr> darkviesSj
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down. "The.mice, from irhe "\o^>
huddled a+ -Vhebo4to»Y)/Scurried -Hqe bag Across a shorn -field. I s+ood ov^r 1+
46 I World Literature Today
graphic literature
& as irhe burning ^e^cl^^d each carbon letter erf what you'd Writf&n
Vike 3 sona <5c-Hie m»Ce
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March-April 2007 i 47
RTfflrmSttmn
Pedro Almodova
selected
texts
Fuego en las entranas (1981) Patty Diphusa y otros textos (1991; Eng. The Patty Diphusa Storiesand Other Writings, 1992) Entre tinieblas(1993) Laflor de mi secreto(1995; Eng. The Flowerof My Secret, 1996) Almodovaron Almodovar(1996) Todosobremi madre(1999) Hable con ella (2002) PedroAlmodovar:Interviews (2004)
One of Spain'smost celebratedfilm directors, Pedro Almodovar was born on September 24, 1949,in Calzadade Calatrava,Ciudad Real, a province of Castile (La Mancha).At the age of sixteen, he moved to Madrid to pursue his passions: filmmaking and writing. He had a variety of odd jobs, living among the underprivileged, until he finally secured regular employmentat Spain'snationaltelephonecompany.His writing careerbegan with comicsand articlescreatedfor counterculturemagazines. As his work developed, Almodovarbegan utilizing the photo-novella form of graphic storytelling, using photographs instead of drawings to illustrate stories. His most well-known character,Patty Diphusa, was first developed as an eroticphoto-novellacharacterand featured in La Viboramagazine in 1982. Almodovar's film career began in 1980 with his first feature-length production, Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del monton. The
film was based on his photo-novellaErecciones generates. Almodovarhas become one of Spain'smost well-known directors,winner of severalCannesFilmFestivalhonors and Academy Awards. His most recent film, Volver, made its U.S. debut at the New York Film Festival in October2006. Compiled by Ashley Lin
48 I World Literature Today
2
X
i t
5:
1
< <
I < s o o
IUq
Oran
Peels ELIF SHAFAK
In The Bastard of Istanbul, Turkish author Elif Shafak's latest novel, Armanoush, the nineteen-year-old
American
daughter of a Turkish father and an Armenian mother, travels to Istanbul in search of her ancestry. While there, she meets her four Turkish aunts and a cousin, Asya, and subsequently
discovers a secret that links the two sides of
her family together and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations
and massacres. When the Turkish edition of
the novel was published in 2005, it was widely circulated and embraced by large segments tion, staying on the best-seller
of the Turkish populalists for more than five
months (the novel has sold more than 100,000
copies to
date). At the same time, it was bitterly attacked by a group of right-wing
nationalist
lawyers, who
pressed charges
against Shafak for "insulting Turkishness" (under the same article of the penal code that has been used to charge Orhan Pamuk and over seventy other writers and journalists to date). After PEN International organized a campaign of appeals on her behalf, the charges against her were dropped in September 2006 after a court in Istanbul ruled that neither Shafak nor her publisher could be prosecuted for something
said by a fictional character. The following
excerpt comes from chapter 9 of the novel.
March -April 2007 i 49
next day Asya Kazanci and Armanoush Tchakhmakhchianleft the konak early in the morning to search for the house where Grandma Shushan had beenborn.Theyfoundtheneighborhood a easily charming,posh borough in the Europeanside of the city. But the house wasn't there anymore.A modern, five-story apartmentbuilding had been erected in its place. The entire first floor was a classy-lookingfish restaurant.Beforegoing in, Asya checked her reflection in the glass, adjustingher hairwhile discontentedlyeyeing her breasts. As it was still too early for dinner, there was no one inside except for a handful of waiters sweeping the tracesof the previous night off the floor and a rosycheeked, stout cook in the kitchen preparingthe mezes and the main courses for the evening under a cloud of mouth-wateringsmells.Asya talkedto eachof them,asking questions about the building's past. But the waiters had arrivedin the city only recently,migratingfrom a Kurdishvillage in the southeast,and the cook, thoughhe had lived longer in Istanbul,did not have any memory of the street'shistory. "Of the long-standing Istanbulite families, only a few have remained in their soil of birth/' the cook explainedwith an air of authority,as he startedgutting and cleaninga huge mackerel. "This city was so cosmopolitan once," the cook continued,breakingthe mackerel'sbackbonefirst above its tail, then below its head. "Wehad Jewishneighbors, lots of them. We also had Greekneighbors,and Armenian neighbors. ... As a boy I used to buy fish from Greek fishermen. My mother's tailor was Armenian. My father'sboss was Jewish. You know, we were all intermingled." "Ask him why things have changed,"Armanoush turnedto Asya. "BecauseIstanbulis not a city,"the cook remarked, his face lighting up with the importanceof the statement he was about to make. "Itlooks like a city but it is not. It is a city-boat.We live in a vessel!" With that he held the fish by its head and started moving the backboneright and left. For a second Armanoush imagined the mackerelto be made of porcelain, fearingit would shatterto pieces in the cook'shands. But in a few seconds the man had managedto takethe whole bone out. Pleased with himself, he continued. "We are all passengers here, we come and go in clusters, Jews
50 I World LiteratureToday
go, Russianscome, my brother'sneighborhoodis full of Moldovians. Tomorrow they will go, others will arrive. That's how it is. They thankedthe cook and shot a last glance at the mackerelwaiting to be stuffed,its mouth still open. Asya disappointed, Armanoush distressed, they walked out of the restaurantinto an exquisiteBosphorus landscapesparklingunder the late winter sun. Theyput theirhands over theireyes to block the sun. Bothtook a deep breath and knew instantly that spring was in the air. Having no better plans, they strolled through the neighborhood, buying something from almost every streetvendor they came upon:boiled sweet corn,stuffed mussels, semolina halvah,and finally, a large package of sunflower seeds. With each new treat,they launched on a new topic, talking about many things, except the three customary untouchablesbetween young women who were still strangersto one another:sex, men, and fathers.[. . .] In thatsame momenttheyboth slowed down. There, half a mile away from them out on the sea was a man standingup in a small motorboatwith severalotherpassengers,holding a newly lit cigarettein one hand, and in the other,a fantastictree of balloonsin glowing yellows, oranges,and purples.Perhapshe was a fatiguedballoon vendor, the father of many children, taking a shortcut from one coast to anotheron his way back from work, without knowing how breathtakinglystrikinga pose he struck,as he dragged along a rain of colors and a plume of smoke over the blue waves. Caught utterly unpreparedby the exquisitenessof the scene, Armanoushand Asya stood silentlywatching the motorboatuntil all the balloonshad disappearedinto the horizon. "Let'ssit somewhere, shall we?" Asya asked, as if tired out by what she had just seen. Therewas a shabby,open air cafe nearby. "Sotell me, what kind of music do you like?"Asya asked, as soon as they had found an empty seat and orderedtheirdrinks- Asya, tea with lemon,Armanoush, Diet Coke with ice. The questionwas a manifestattempt to becomebetteracquainted,since music happenedto be Asya's main connectionwith the entireworld. "Classicalmusic, ethnic music, Armenian music, and jazz,"Armanoushreplied. "How aboutyou?" "A bit different."Asya blushed though she didn't know why. "Fora while I listened to harsh stuff- you
Asya disappointed,Armanoushdistressed,they walkedout of the restaurantinto an exquisiteBosphoruslandscape sparklingunderthe late winter sun.They put their hands over their eyes to block the sun. Both took a deep breathand knew instantlythat springwas in the air. know, alternative music, punk, postpunk, industrial metal, death metal, darkwave,psychedelic,also a bit of third-waveska and a bit of gothic, that sort of stuff/7 Accustomed to regarding "that sort of stuff7as a lost genre sharedby decadentteenagersor directionless adultswith more fury thancharacter,Armanoushasked, "Really?" "Yeah,but then some time ago I got hooked on JohnnyCash.And that was it. Ever since then I stopped listening to anything else. I like Cash. He depresses me so deeply, I am not depressedanymore." "Butdon't you listen to anythinglocal?LikeTurkish music . . . Turkishpop." "Turkishpop!!!No way!"Asya flappedher hands in panic as if tryingto wave away a pushy streetvendor. Sensing her limits, Armanoush did not press the questionany further.Self-hatred,she deduced, could be somethingthe Turkswent through. But Asya tossed back her tea, and added, "Auntie Feride likes that kind of stuff. Though, to be perfectly honest,I sometimescan'ttell if it's the music or the singers' hairstylesthat she is most interestedin." Halfwaythroughher second Diet Coke,Armanoush asked Asya what kind of books she read, since fiction was her main connectionwith the entireworld. "Books.Oh yeah, they saved my life, you know. I love reading,but not fiction. A boisterous group of boys and girls materialized in the cafe, and they were ushered to the table across from Asya and Armanoush.As soon as they sat down, they started to scoff at everyone and everything. They laughed at the plastic burgundy chairs, the glass cases displayinga modest selectionof refreshments,the errors in the English translationsof the items listed on the menu, and the i love IstanbulT-shirtsthe waiters wore. Asya and Armanoushyanked theirchairsforward. "I read philosophy, politicalphilosophy especially, you know. Benjamin,Adorno, Gramsci,a bit of Zizek . . . especially Deleuze. That kind of stuff. I like them. I
like abstractions,I guess, philosophy- I love philosophy. Especiallyexistentialphilosophy."Asya lit anothercigarette and asked throughthe smoke, "How aboutyou?" Armanoushnamed an elongatedlist of fictionwriters, mostly Russianand EasternEuropean. "You see?" Asya turned both palms up, as if to indicate the situationmade by the two of them. "When it comes to your favoriteoccupationin life, you too are less regionalin your choices Yourreadinglist doesn't sound very Armenianto me." Armanoush's eyebrow slightly rose. "Literature needs freedom to thrive,"she said as she wagged her head. "We didn't have much of that to expand and enlargeArmenianliterature,did we?" Sensing her limits, Asya did not press the question further. Self-pity,she deduced, could be something any the Armenianswent through. The teenagersbehind startedto play a game of charades. Eachchosen player was assigned a movie title by the rivalteam,which he then had to convey to his fellow team members.A freckled,ginger-hairedgirl startedto mimic the assigned movie title and each time she came up with a gesture, the others broke into raucouslaughter. It was odd to see how a game based on the principle of silence could cause so much clamor. Perhaps because of the noise in the background, whatever spirit had guided Armanoushnot to trespass her limits had now departed."Themusic you listen to is so Western.Why don't you listen to your MiddleEastern roots?" "What do you mean?" Asya sounded perplexed. "WeareWestern." "No, you are not Western.Turks are Middle Eastern but somehow in constant denial. And if you had let us stay in our homes, we too could still be Middle Easternersinstead of turning into a diaspora people," Armanoush retorted arid instantly felt discomfited for she hadn't meant to sound so harsh.
March-April 2007 i 51
Asya gnawed the insidesof hermouth,but when she had finished,all she said was, "Whatdo you mean?" "What do I mean? I mean, Sultan Hamid's PanTurkishand Pan-Islamicyoke. I mean, the 1909 Adana massacresor the 1915 deportations.... Do those ring a bell? Did you not hear anything about the Armenian genocide?" "I'monly nineteen."Asya shrugged. The teenagers behind cheered as the freckled girl failed to accomplishher task in time and was replaced by a new player,a lanky,handsomeboy whose Adam's apple jutted out from his neck with each mimic. The boy lifted three fingers, indicatingthat the movie's title consisted of three words. He proceeded into the third and last word directly.Raisingboth hands into the air,he clutchedan imaginary,round thing between his palms, smelled and squeezed it. While his team membersfailed to understandwhat thatmeant,the rivalteam snickered. "Isthat an excuse?"Armanoushlooked Asya in the eye. "How can you be so impervious?" Not knowing the meaning of impervious, Asya saw no problemin personifyingthe word until she had found an English-Turkishdictionaryand looked it up. Savoring the brief reappearanceof the sun from behind thick clouds, she remainedquiet for what felt like a long time. Thenshe murmured,"You'refascinatedwith history." "And you aren't?"drawled Armanoush,her voice conveyingboth disbeliefand scorn. "What'sthe use of it?" was Asya's curt answer. "Whyshould I know anythingaboutthe past?Memories are too much of a burden." Armanoush turned her head, and her gaze involuntarily settled on the teenagers. Narrowing her eyes she concentratedon the boy's gestures.Asya too turned around,observedthe game, and before she knew it, she blurtedout the answer:"Orange!" The teenagersburst into laughter,all looking at the young women at the next table. Asya flushed crimson, Armanoushsmiled. They paid the bill quicklyand were out on the streetagain. "Whatmovie has 'orange'in its name?"Armanoush asked once they had reachedthe path along the seaside. "A ClockworkOrange ... I guess."
"Ohyeah!"Armanoushconceded with a nod. "Listen, about the fascinationwith history,"she said, marshaling her thoughts. "Youhave to understand,despite all the grief that it embodies, history is what keeps us alive and united."
52 I World LiteratureToday
"Well,I say that'sa privilege." "Whatdo you mean?" "Thissense of continuityis a privilege.It makesyou part of a group where there is a great feeling of solidarity," Asya replied. "Don'tget me wrong, I can see how tragic the past was for your family, and I respect your wish to keep the memoriesalive come what may so that the sorrow of your ancestorsis not forgotten.But that is precisely where our paths diverge. Yours is a crusade for remembrancewhereas if it were me, I'd ratherbe just like Petite-Ma,with no capacity for reminiscence whatsoever." "Whydoes the past frightenyou so?" Asya demurred. "It doesn't!"As the capriciousto and fro of the Istanbulwind flutteredher long skirtand cigarette smoke every which way, she paused briefly. "Ijust don't want to have anything to do with it, that's all." "Thatdoesn't make sense,"Armanoushinsisted. "Perhapsit doesn't. But in all honesty, someone like me can never be past-oriented.. . . You know why?" Asya asked after a long pause. "Not because I find my past poignant or that I don't care. It's because I don't know anything about it. I think it's better to have the knowledge of past events than not to know anythingat all." An expression of puzzlement passed over Armanoush's face. "Butyou also said you didn'twant to know your past. Now you sound different." "I do?" Asya asked. "Well,let's put it this way, I have conflicting voices inside me with respect to this issue."She gave her companiona glancefull of mischief but then her voice became more serious. "All I know aboutmy past is that somethingwasn't right,and I can't attain that information. For me history starts today, you see? There is no continuity in time. You can't feel attached to ancestorsif you can't even trace your own father. Maybe I will never be able to learn my father's name. If I keep thinkingabout it, I'll go nuts. So I say to myself, why do you want to unearththe secrets?Don't you see that the past is a vicious circle?It is a loop. It sucks us in and makes us run like a hamsteron a wheel. Then we startto repeatourselves,again and again." As they walked up and down on the undulating streets, every neighborhood looked so different that Armanoushbegan to thinkIstanbulwas an urbanmaze, cities within a city. She wondered if JamesBaldwinhad felt the same way when he was here.
At three o'clock in the afternoon, exhausted and hungry, they entereda restaurant,which Asya said was a must, since it was here that one could find the best chickendonerin town. They each got a donerand a large glass of frothyyogurt drink. "I have to confess/' Armanoush muttered after a lull. "Istanbulis a bit differentfrom what I expected.It's more modernand less conservativethan I feared." "Well,you should tell that to my Auntie Cevriye sometime.She'd be thrilled.She'll give me a medallion for having representedmy countryso well!" They laughed togetherfor the firsttime since they'd met. "There'sa place I want to take you to sometime," Asya said. "Itis this little cafe where we regularlymeet. CafeKundera." "Really?He's one of my favorite authors!"Armanoush exclaimedin delight. "Whyis it called that?" "Well,that'san endless debate.Actually,every day we develop a new theory." On the way back to the konak,Armanoushgrabbed Asya's hand and squeezed it as she said, "Youremind me of a friendof mine." Fora while she looked at Asya like she knew something but couldn't tell. But then she remarked,"I have never seen anyone so perceptiveand ... so ... so empatheticbe so stringentand so ... so confrontationalat the same time. Except one person! You remind me of my most unusual friend:BaronBaghdassarian.You two are so alike in many ways, you could well be soul mates." "Oh yeah?"Asya asked, the name intriguing her. "Whatis it? Tell me why you're laughing?" "I'm sorry, I couldn't help laughing at the twist of fate," Armanoushsaid. "It'sjust that among all my acquaintancesBaron Baghdassarianhappens to be the most- mostanti-Turk!"
That night when all the Kazanciwomen had gone to sleep, Armanoush slipped out of her bed in pajamas, turned on the frail desk lamp, and doing her very best not to make any noise, turned on her laptop. Never beforehad she realizedhow distressinglynoisy it could be to get online. She dialed the telephonenumber,found the network node, and typed in her password to be logged into Cafe Constantinopolis.
Where have U been? We were so sick worried! How RU?
Questionsbegan to come in from everyone. I'm okay, wrote Madame My-Exiled-Soul. But I've not been able to find grandma's house. In its place there is an ugly modern building. It's gone. No traces left behind . . . There are no traces, no records, no reminiscences of the Armenian family who lived in that building at the beginning of the century. I am so sorry dear, Lady Peacock/ Siramark wrote. When R U coming back? I'llstay till the end of the week, Madame My-ExiledSoul replied. It is quite an adventure here. The city is beautiful. It resembles San Franciscoin some ways, the hilly streets, the constant fog and sea breeze, and the bohemian faces in places least expected. It is an urban maze here. More than one single city, it is like cities within a city. By the way, the cuisine is fantastic. EveryArmenian would be in heaven here.
Armanoushhalted, realizingin panic what she had I mean, in termsof food, she added quickly. written. just Yo Madame My-Exiled-Soul,you were our war reporter and now you sound like a Turk! You have not been Turkified,have you? It was Anti-Khavurma.
Armanoushtook a deep breath. The opposite. I have never felt more Armenian in my life. You see, for me to fully experience my Armenianness, I had to come to Turkeyand meet the Turks. The family I am living with is quite interesting, a bit crazy but perhaps all families are. But there is something surreal here. Irrationalityis part of the everyday rationale. I feel like I am in a Garcia Marquez novel. One of the sisters is a tattoo artist; another sister is a clairvoyant;one other is a national history teacher; and the fourth is an eccentric wallflower, or a full-time cuckoo, as Asya would say. Who is Asya?Lady Peacock/Siramark typed instantly. She is the daughter of the household. A young woman with four mothers and no father, quite a character- full of rage, satire, and wit. She'd make a good Dostoyevsky character.
Armanoushwondered where on earthBaronBaghdassarianwas. Madame My-Exiled-Soul,have you talked about the genocide with anyone? Miserable-Coexistence wanted to know. Yes, several times, but it is so difficult. The women in the house listened to my family's historywith sincere inter-
March-April 2007 153
With the discomfort of all the words she lacked in English etched on her face, Auntie Banu made a series of gestures, as if she too were playing charades. She shook her head, furrowed
est and sorrow but that is as far as they could get. The past is another country for the Turks. If even the women stop there, I cannot possibly be hopeful about their men ... the Daughter of Sappho cut in. Actually, I haven't yet found the chance to talk to any Turkishmen, Madame My-Exiled-Soul wrote back only just now realizing this. But one of these days Asya will take me to this cafe where they meet regularly.There I will get to know at least some men, I guess. Be careful if you drink with them. Alcohol brings out the worst in people, you know. That was Alex the Stoic. I don't think Asya drinks. They're Muslims! But she sure smokes like a chimney. Lady Peacock/ Siramark wrote, In Armenia people smoke a lot too. I revisited Erevanrecently. Cigarettes are killingthe nation.
Armanoushfidgeted in her chair. Where was he? Why wasn't he writing?Was he angry or cross at her? Had he been thinking about her at all? . . . She would have gone on torturingherselfwith questions,if it hadn't been for the next line that appearedon the shimmering screen. Tell us, Madame My-Exiled-Soul,since you have been to Turkey,have you pondered the Janissary'sParadox?
It was him! Him! Him! Armanoushrereadthe two lines, after which she typed: Yes, I have. But then she didn't know what else to write. As if he had sensed her hesitation,BaronBaghdassariancontinued. It's very nice of you to get along with that family so well. And I believe you when you say they are goodhearted people, interesting in their own way. But don't you see? You are their friend only insofar as you deny your own identity. That's how it has been with the Turks all through history.
54 I World Literature Today
Armanoushpursed her lips, saddened.At the other end of the room, Asya tossed and turned in her bed, in the throes of what looked like a nightmare,and murmured something incomprehensible.Whatevershe was saying, she repeatedit many times. All we Armenians ask for is the recognition of our loss and pain, which is the most fundamental requirement for genuine human relationships to flourish, This is what we say to the Turks: Look, we are mourning, we have been mourning for almost a century now, because we lost our loved ones, we were driven out of our homes, banished from our land; we were treated like animals and butchered like sheep. We have been denied even a decent death. Even the pain inflicted on our grandparents is not as agonizing as the systematic denial that followed. Ifyou say this, what will be the Turks'response? NothThere is only one single way of becoming friends with ing! the Turks:to be just as uninformed and forgetful. Since they won't join us in our recognition of the past, we are expected to join them in their ignorance of the past.
All of a sudden, there was a light knock on the door, and then therewere too many knocks.Armanoush slumped in her chair, her heart leaped into her throat. She impulsively turned off the computerscreen. "Yes," she whispered. The door opened gently and Auntie Banu's head popped in. She had a rosy, loosely tied scarfon her head now and a long, pasty nightgown. Awake at this hour for a prayer,she had noticed the light coming from the girls' room. With the discomfortof all the words she lacked in English etched on her face, Auntie Banu made a series of gestures, as if she too were playing charades. She shook her head, furrowedher brows, and then smilingly
her brows, and then smilingly wagged a finger- all of which Armanoush interpreted as: "Youstudy a lot. Don't tire yourself too much." wagged a finger- all of which Armanoushinterpreted as: "Youstudy a lot. Don't tire yourselftoo much/' After that Auntie Banu shoved forward the plate in her hand and mimicked an eating effect, both too obvious to need any interpretation.She smiled, patted Armanoush'sshoulder,put the plate next to the laptop, and then left, closing the door softly behind her. On the plate were two oranges,peeled and sliced. Turningon the screen again, Armanoushbit into a slice of orange,as she contemplatedwhat to write back to BaronBaghdassarian.
From The Bastardof Istanbul,copyright © 2007 by Elif Shafak. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (usa) Inc. To learn more about the novel, visit the Penguin website at us.penguingroup.com.
Istanbul/ Tucson
I^^LUdSlMMilSU^ Reason Enough by Ida Vitale
/ translated by Sarah Pollack
Ida Vitale writes poetry that stimulates the mind, the heart and the soul. From her early recognition by Spanish Nobel Laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez her words have created new ways of seeing the everyday. As a member of Uruguay's "Generation of 1945" she worked with such noted writers as Mario Benedetti, Carlos Maggiand Idea Vilarino to create a new literary voice in Uruguay. The poems collected in this Reason Enough, address many of Vitale's vital concerns: the process of literary creation, the place of poetry in the contemporary world, and humanity's ethical response to nature and history. This bilingual edition of Ida Vitales work is a must for any reader who desires to find new vistas in their world and themselves. 978-0-924047-42-8 - $ 12.00 softcover 5 ' 2 x 8 ' 2 90 pages
f^^^yEfffiWfiT^ffilBCTWi!Pry«^ March-April 2007 155
^^H
iKHSflMiBiiaBfim Y U y i IV ?ii I d. Itr*5
56 I World Literature Today
I wrote L/Yf/e M#/zfduring the dark,cold It was the end of the year, winter. of days and my writers' group, The Revisionaries, had unveiled its traditionalholiday assignment:we were to choose two ideas to use as triggers for creating a new story. The ideas we chose that winter were "a lost thing''and "hairdos." I had been mesmerizedfora while by own memories of my mother doing my our hairwhen my sistersand I were chil-
dren. My mother would sit us in a chair to do pigtails, ponytails,chignons,and a long assortmentof her own designs. I also remembered that it wasn't always easy for my motherto get us girls to the hairdo chair. I mostly remember that my sister Elizabethwould disappear whenever Mamacalled. Mostof the time Elizabethwas hiding in our bedroom or outside playing soccer with the neighborhood boys- her hair exactly the way
IMnNRMHlli HHHII
she liked, lose and untamed like a feral child.She usually cried while Mama did herhair. Forme it was different.My hair was the longest of all;it spilled straightall the way to my waist. Mama, who had once dreamedof being a hair stylist, enjoyed braidingit, twisting it, and pinning it up with ornamentsthat she made herselfbread-dough flowers, felt pom-poms, knittedrosettes, or tiny yellow, pungent
flowers from my aunt's tree. Until I was eleven, Mama did my hair every day. With these memories in mind, that year of our assignment, I began to play. The idea of things lost turned into the hide-and-seek game between Mother Sky and Little Night. I know I was also influencedby the long dark hours of the winter;the night skies have always been a wonderment to me. In the end, Little Nightwas my personalcelebrationof hair
and hairdos, chores and games, night, earth,and sky, but it is also a celebration of being a child and of being loved. From Little Night / Nochecita,by Yuyi Morales, published by arrangement with the author and Neal Porter Books. Illustration © 2007 by Yuyi Morales. Forthcoming in April 2007 from Roaring Brook Press. To learn more, consult your local bookseller or visit the Roaring Brook website at www.holtzbrinckus.com.
March-April 2007 1yj
Romesh Gunesekera's Chekhovian novel of happiness thwarted. Fiction, page 61
FICTION Jorge Eduardo Benavides. La noche de Morgana. Lima, Peru. Alfaguara. 2005. 173 pages, isbn84-204-6734-0
Jorge Eduardo Benavidesbelongs to a new generationof writerswho have emerged on the Peruvian literary scene in recent years. Since the 1990s,Benavideshas resided in Spain,where he recentlypublished two novels that chronicle political events in Peruduringthe 1980sand 1990s: Los anos inutiles (2002) and El ano que rompicontigo (2003), both of
which received respectful critical attention.In his most recent book, La noche de Morgana, a collection
of eleven short stories, Benavides also places some of his characters within the context of recent Peruvian history- that is, the violent and inflation-ridden government of Alan Garcia in the 1980s and the dictatorshipof AlbertoFujimori between 1990 and 2000. What is noteworthy about many of these texts, however, is Benavides'sability to blend importantpoliticalcommentarywith elements that belong to fantasticliterature. It is obvious that one of Benavides's literary masters is Julio Cortazar.Like Cortazar,Benavides shares an interestin the idea of the
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Miriam Katin's universal tale of loss and redemption. Fiction, page 66
double- that is, linking people and events in differenttimes and places while exploring hidden dimensions of reality. Such is the case in stories like "El Ekeko,""Tigre," and "Senasparticulares,ninguna," for example, in which Benavides displays good technique in constructing worlds filled with invisible parallelsand correspondences, as ordinaryhuman beings in ordinary situationssuddenly find themselves surroundedby extraordinary circumstances.This is also the case in "Lanoche de Morgana,"the best story in the collection, where the protagonistfinds herselftrappedin the ghostlikecity of Limaas she trys to return home during a military curfew. Morgana's complex personal life and the social turmoil of the momentsubtlycome togetherin the plot, evolving into a situationof fear and despair,despite her strong sense of determination.Such other stories as "A microfonoabierto,"in which the protagonistis a journalist arrested for opposing the Fujimori regime, focus on the repressive state that quietly operated in Peru in the 1990s.In "Futboly fricciones" and "Fracasadosocial," Benavides exploresthe scarredpsyches of outsiders in society- individuals who took a wrong turn in their lives and now live a marginalexistence.
MarcelCohen's elegy for the Ladino diaspora. Miscellaneous, page 75
Another fine example along these same lines is "ElUlysses de Joyce," the story of a lonesome bureaucrat whose fascinationwith James Joyce's masterpiece leads him to exploreobsessivelythe mysteriesof language in his own daily life, only to become a fatal victim of his own demons. Significantly,Benavides's writing craftspsychologicallycomplex situationsin these stories that never allow for a single, unequivocal interpretationof why these individual lives fell throughthe cracks. Indeed, the lessons of Cortazar's fantastic literatureare at the backgroundof some of Benavides's best storytelling.Timeand againhis charactersarecaughtin worlds they cannot understand nor influence because, despite their best intentions, realitywill operateaccording to its own establishedforces. Such traits make La noche de Morgana an
entertainingand even challenging book to read. But as JorgeEduardo Benavides well proves, the art of good writing lies ultimately in the domain of language and its many possibilitiesto createmultiplerealities, a goal he accomplishes very well. CesarFerreira University of Wisconsin,Milwaukee
Klaus Boldl. Drei Flusse. Frankfurta.M. S. Fischer. 2006. 110 pages. €16.90. isbn3-10-007621-4
About two hundredyears ago, religious securities disappearedwhile reason gained increasinginfluence. The world becamecolder and more complicated.Since then, poets have tried to reconstructthe lost state of the world and create something in art that modern existenceis hardly able to achieve anymore:a life that is one with itself and the outside world. In this long, sometimes creative, sometimes difficult tradition, Klaus Boldl's oeuvre can be located. After his first novels, Studie in Kristallbildungand Suedlich von Abisko, Boldl abandonednarrative structures and, starting with the hauntingly beautiful Die Fernen Inseln, he turned to observations and mysticalreflectionsinstead. Boldl'srecentbook, DreiFliisse, is an homage to his Germanhometown of Passau.The town's historic stratificationsare manifest in the form of churches dedicated to St. Severin,St. Gertraud,and St. Achatius, silent witnesses to the changes
that occurred over the centuries. The narrator'sthoughts not only wander back to the building of the churches or the fire of 1662 that engulfed the entire town in flames, forced the people outside the city walls, and melted the tin of the churchorgans,but they also reveal the narratoras someone who wants to become one with the past and indulge in its timelessness. Timeless, too, are the rivers that surroundPassau in southeastern Bavaria. To the narrator,the Ilz, which originates in the Bavarian Forests; the Danube, with its cargo ships on their way through Europe;and the glacier-greenInn, with its frequentrapids,areprimordial rivers, and he does not want anything more than a life dictated and led by them. He searches for a connection to this nature, on the banks of which people take their dogs for walks indifferently and elderly women sit in the sun. However, being wrapped up in nature demands a high price when the forces of nature make themselves known with every flood. t In Drei Fliisse, Boldl explores both his hometown and identity. Like the rivers that flow through Passau, the narrator meanders through the town's streets,history, and his own consciousness.Boldl's language is elaborate, rhythmic, and richin associationand imagery. This is a highly poetic book and an accomplished attempt at narrating a naturallandscape. HaroldLeusmann Ball State University Peter Carey. Theft: A Love Story. New York. Knopf. 2006. 269 pages. $24. isbn0-307-26371-1
Lately, I open a new Peter Carey novel with the same anticipation
I used to reserve for releases by Australia's Nobel laureate Patrick White. This response seemed particularly appropriateto Theft,Carey's latest, because it remindedme almost at once of PatrickWhite's 1970 novel, The Vivisector,which also centeredon a painter. The similarities are many. In both novels, the authors' protagonists seem deliberatelyself-referential: White saw himself as an "artist manque," and Carey's Michael Boone was born in the same year and town as Carey himself. Both protagonistsmetaphoricallycannibalize their subjects,their capacity for crueltysignaledby White'sparalleling of art with vivisection and Carey's with butchery. (Boone's father was a butcher; Boone was supposed to pursuethe familybusiness, and his nickname in the art world is "ButcherBones.")Equally telling is the fact that both artists have damaged but disturbingly prescientsiblings (Rhodathe hunchbacked rodent/rose in The Vivisector,and Hugh the dimwitted brother in Theft) who mirror the protagonistsand articulatetheir unquenchableconsciences. At one point, Butcher muses that he and his brother are "linked . . . like a bloody doublehelix."Bothprotagonists also endure the fickleness of the world of artisticreception.Most crucially,both novels navigate the ambiguitiesand moralchallengesof the conflictsbetween art and lifeimmortality versus temporality, immutabilityversus growth,enduring value versus expediency, and immunityversus vulnerability.This is territorypreviously explored in the fictionof both writers:by White especially in Riders in the Chariot and TheSolidMandala,and by Carey in JackMaggs and My Lifeas a Fake.
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In their quests,both White'sHurtle Duffieldand Carey'sButcherBones begin by assertingart as life's skeleton and seeking there for ultimate orderingprinciples. The differences in the novels are also profound, and perhaps more revealing than their similarities. One differenceis that of voice. While White is always White, an instantly recognizable high modernist,Careyhas an uncannyability to channel the voices of his characters, such that the novel's alternating narration by Butcher and Hugh never dislocates the reader but rather trains two different yet equally illuminating lights on the same scenes. More central to the novels' themes is the differencein their protagonists'ultimate revelations. While White's artist paints his final canvas with the elusive and "otherwiseunnameableI-N-Dwhich is the hue and sign of I-G-O," the "indi-ggod"he seeks, the quest of Carey'sprotagonisttakes him in the opposite direction,into "greens so fucking dark,satanic,blackholes that could suck your heart out of your chest."While Hurtle achieves the vision of divinityand wholeness with which White often rewarded (and punished) his protagonists, Butchercolludes with the devil and learns that all art is piracy, vanity, imitation, and appropriation.The only way to be good at it is to be an accomplished, amoral thief or worse. In some ways, Butcher'sis the ultimate postmodernistillumination. The fact that Carey makes this commonplace touch the heart also suggests why he remainshere, as in all his fiction, a writer worth engaged, surprising, and joyous reading. CarolynBliss University of Utah
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Gianrico Carofiglio. A Walk in the Dark. Howard Curtis, tr. London. Bitter Lemon.2006.215pages.£9.99/$14.95. isbn 1-904738-17-6
A Walk in the Dark is a mystery
novel, written by an experienced Italian lawyer, who recounts the story of the lawyer Guerrieri'sfight for Martina in court against her ex-boyfriend,the son of a powerful judge. As her lawyer,he accusesthe judge's son of assault and battery. He agreed to take on the difficult case since he himself was attracted to a nun, Sister Claudia, a young woman (who turned out to be no nun at all) in charge of the shelter where Martinalived. In his descriptions of this case, author Gianrico Carofiglioshows deep insight into human nature and depicts vividly the courtroom drama that takes place. He describes the lawyer Guerrieri'spersonalhabits,his true feelings toward an opposing lawyer, the pressureof legal work and the anxieties connected with it. In this account, short love episodes occur.Thejudge'sson, Scianatico,is finally arrestedfor kidnappingand
murder following the violent fatal blows he gives to Martina. The novel, a legal thriller, is divided into two parts and short sectionswithout headings.The narrativeis subjective,with passagesof dialogue and briefphysicaldescriptions of variouscharacters.Original metaphors and comparisons add interestto the tale. Forexample,we meet a girl named Silvia who has "the intense expression of a stone bass." Or again, we read about the lawyerrepresentingthe defendant's case (who claims that Martina is unbalancedand insane) as "a kind of 240 pound pit-bull"who greets Guerrieriin a manner "as friendly as a python." Various smells are oftenmentioned.Forinstance,in the court entrancehall, one encounters a smell frequentlyfound in railway stationsor on crowdedbuses. Sister Claudia'soffice seems to smell like sandalwoodincense. A Walk in the Dark is a power-
ful novel well translatedin a clear style using everyday vocabulary. We witness the life of a lawyerboth his sufferings and his happy moments- in this notable work of crimefiction. Patricia M. Gathercole Roanoke College Pierre Christin. Petits crimes contre les humanites. Paris. Metailie. 2006. 252 pages. €10. isbn2-86424-583-3 Petits crimes contre les humanites, by
Pierre Christin,better known as a writerfor comic books and films, is an amusingsatireon Frenchuniversity life, bureaucracy,and detective fiction. Intriguesand murdersin a small, provincial university begin with an e-mail accusing a famous professorof plagiarism,which leads to his fatalheartattack.Themessage concludes with "Jedemdas Seine"
(to eachhis due), a citationfromthe entranceto Buchenwald.Simon, a part-time teacher (who is unable to complete his thesis because his supervisorhas become a Buddhist monk), by chance witnesses the death, recognizes the citation, and cannot escape a role investigating the crime. The motif for the crimes is the professor'svaluablecollection of paintings and art books, which Simonand his friendscleverlymanage to keep out of the hands of a Texas billionaire and a greedy Parisiancivil servant,proving that writing is stronger than weapons. Simonalso managesto bed a young studentwith whom he has fallen in love, in a crypt where he hides the treasure. The detective's investigations, never very serious,are interspersed with descriptions of faculty meetings in which nothing is decided, conferences in which participants all speak a bastardized English, classes in which the students'questions are always on the marking scheme, never on the subjectof the lecture. The few professors lucky enough to get sabbaticalsare more concernedwith the work of "Black and Decker" than of "Mauss and Durkheim."The universityworld is full of teacherson meager salaries, whose only perk is the occasional trip to a conference.Buildings are on the verge of collapse. Humanities coursesareconsideredby scientists to be "inutiles. . . negatifs,couteux et ne menantqu'au chomage." Unable to provide an instructorfor Turkish exchange students with limited knowledge of French, the university hires a Turkish student who has failed the first-yearcourse three times and delivers pizzas for his unclebut who has helped Simon with his investigations. There are
also incidental satires of a radical student attackon geneticallymodified plants and a radical feminist attackon professors. The novel is full of amusing wordplay. Christin mocks the French use of abbreviations,such as the DEUG,the DEA (which are real university diplomas),to which he adds a number of imaginary acronyms: the DELSH(directeur d'enseignements litteraires et de sciences humaines). He includes quotationsin severallanguagesand in several scripts: computer signs, Greek,phoneticalphabet. Petits crimescontre les humanites
is very enjoyablereading for anyone who has ever had contactwith any universityor bureaucracy. Adele King Pans Romesh Gunesekera. The Match. London. Bloomsbury. 2006. 307 pages. £15. isbn0-7475-7858-3
Sunny, The Match's central character (like Romesh Gunesekera), was born in Sri Lanka,moved with his parents to the Philippines,then went to study in England.In the fictional present, Sunny is (un)settled in the United Kingdom. "Match" refersto cricket(the novel will have an extra appeal to readerswho are also cricket fans) and to the effort to find a "match"in life- purpose, happiness, a sense of belonging. Sri Lanka's passionate interest in cricketis partly due to the island's present sorry state. It's a "Paradise Isle" (tourist slogan) enjoyed by foreign visitors and wealthy locals while the majority endure the consequence of ethnic conflict (the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983), poverty, crime,and corruptionthat has penetrated even the citizen's last bastions: the police and the
judiciary.Sri Lanka's cricket team is a sorely needed source of pride. Thus, the novel opens with reference to the ethnic conflict, and laterSunny finds temporaryrefuge and happinessby watching cricket, though it's "onlya game,"and does not alterlife's importantrealities. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. If the meaning of "banality"includes the commonplace, and if the commonplace escapes notice, then one can say that Gunesekera'swriting is about the banality of tragedy- of exile and loss, unnoticed failure and loneliness.Sunny'smothercommits suicide;his journalistfatherfails to find the words; his friend Ranil takes flight to the East, into meditation. There are other characters, like old Stan, who, after a lifetime in England, returns to Czechoslovakia so that he can hear himself addressed once again by his real name, Stanislav."Sunny"is also an Anglicization (of his Asian name) and ironic in that he is not sunny, neither within himself nor to others, trapped with a gulf (of failure, isolation) looming before him and anotherbehind that cuts off retreat to the past. Fissures and cracks
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widen; he's unable to communicate with his (English) partner and is distancedfromtheirson, though he loves him and worries whether his will be but "theinheritanceof loss/r (a la Kiran Desai's novel). Sunny escapes into whisky and watching cricket. The sudden note of hope at the end isn't reassuring:one fears Sunny will be disillusioned. The novel's third sentence is italicized, with a personal reference and a national (Sri Lankan)resonance:"I only hope it is not too late."However, the words seem to expressmore doubt and fear than real hope. As I've suggested elsewhere, there is in Gunesekeraa Chekhoviansimultaneous awareness:of the potential for human happiness but also that happinessremainsthwarted,unfulfilled, or delayed until it's too late. TheMatchconfirmsRomesh Gunesekeraas a perceptiveand sensitive, restrainedand subtle writer. CharlesSarvan Berlin Other Short Fiction: Women Japanese by Japanese Women. Ruth Ozeki, foreword. Cathy Layne, comp. Tokyo / New York. Kodansha International. 2006. 240 pages. $22.95. isbn4-7700-3006-1 Inside
and
Kodansha's recent collection of short stories, Inside, gives us the voice of Japanesewomen by Japanese women: from teens to menopausal, schoolgirls to working mothers, divorcees and plucky sex workers. We don't see here the Hollywood-style,white man's faux memoir as in Memoirs of a Geisha.
The powerful, iconoclastic characters dare to destroy the image of Japanese women as submissive, obedient, and mysteriously erotic and exotic.
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The eight storiesassembledfor the collection are written by popular prizewinningauthorswho have never before published in English. The youngest, Rio Shimamoto,the author of the title story 'Inside," once part of a wave of seventeenyear-old novelists, is currently a university student. Her story portrays a naive teenager's first sexual experience as she watches her parents ending their marriage. In Tamaki Daido's "Milk," a different kind of teenager "leads us into her world, where adult men date middle-schoolgirls."Fashions,relationships with friends and family, sex with boyfriends, are "as fickle as the changingweather." In Yuzuki Muroi's"Piss,"suggestive of MurakamiRyu's erotic novel Topaz, a prostitute on her twentieth birthday, never beaten by crueltyand abuse, courageously faces her life. Anotherbirthdaygirl, in JunkoHasegawa's"TheUnfertilized Egg,"turningthirty-six,single and knowing the end of infertile love with a married boss, dreams about eggs.
Transsexual writer Chiyo Fujino's "Her Room" is about a divorced woman trapped by an annoying misfit strangely intruding into her life. Amy Yamada's "Fiesta"delves into the depth of the psyche of a sexuallyrepressedoffice lady. UchidaShungiku's"MySon's Lips"is a witty story abouta working mother'strials and tribulations after an accidentalencounterwith a cabdriver.EldestTakagiNobuko, excellingin explorationsof love and marriage,draws out the crisis of a fifty-year-oldhousewife. Japanese women, as in Japanese AmericanauthorRuthOzeki's foreword,"haveindeed comea long way from the world of geisha-girls and Madame Butterfly.How far?" Maybe going too far for Western readers. YoshikoFukushima University of Oklahoma Jerzy R. Krzyzanowski. Dekady: Lubelskie. Lublin, Opowiadania 217 Poland. Norbertinum. 2006. pages. 20 z\. isbn83-7222-265-7
To his former students, Jerzy R. Krzyzanowskiis first and foremost a scholarof the highestorder.When we look at Dekady:Opowiadania we realize that its author Lubelskie, is also a first-class fiction writer. Krzyzanowskihappens to be a rare combination of the two in one: a high-classscholarand a giftedwriter. He is the author of five major novels and, as a frequentreviewer for WLT,he has some five hundred scholarly bibliographic entries to his credit. Bornin Lublin,the authorwas arrestedin 1944 by Poland's communist regime.He spent threegrim years as a prisoner in the Soviet Union. Upon his release,he studied Polish literature at the University
of Warsaw,where his father,Julian Krzyzanowski,was a shining star. Jerzy graduated with an M.A. in I959, the same year he emigrated to the United States. He lectured and taught at several universities, earning his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michiganin 1965. At present he is professor emeritus at Ohio State University. Dekady(Decades)is a collection of twenty-two tales and short stories, previously published primarily in various periodicals.Subtitled "Opowiadania Lubelskie" (Lublin tales),most of them have some connection with Lublin or its region. In the majority of the stories, the action falls between 1939and 1947. Most appeared in the press outside Poland. It is good that for the first time the author brings them together and makes the collection available for the Polish reader at home. The volume is dedicated to ElizabethG. Krzyzanowska(19252005),the author'swife who passed away a year before the book was published. The short story entitled "Ulica Ksiezycowa" (Moon street) opens the collection. In a kaleidoscope of seven pages, we see almost the whole life of Maryna.It all began in Lublinin the spring of 1939,when, at the age of sixteen,she fell in love. Maryna frequently looked down from her apartment window on the valley below and called it the Moon Valley. Then came the war. She joined the Red Cross and, for days on end, splatteredwith blood and mud, she handed urinalsto the wounded soldiers. Her first love, Marcin, arrested by the Russians, perished somewhere in a Soviet prison. Maryna now fell in love with Wojtek, a promising third-
year student in the underground technical university. They married on August 1, 1944.In two weeks she became a widow when he was shot by the Germans. She was twenty. After the end of the war, Maryna moved to Zielona Gora in the western region annexed to Poland, where she spent the next thirty years as a registered nurse. Upon learningof her mother'sdeath, she returnedto her native town. Looking at the valley that she knew so well as a young girl, she could not clearly see the name of the street. She put on her glasses. Tearscame down her cheeks when she read "UlicaKsiezycowa/' If you look for a model short story par excellence, this is one. It is singled out here as representative of many others in this collection. One story about the author's schoolteacher, "Kitaj," written with a great sense of humor, brings tears to your eyes. The title story, "Dekady," gives flashes of the author's life every ten years. Bringingin his wife, El, in the very last story, the authorshows us how close they were to each other. A vivid and natural dialogue reigns supreme in Jerzy Krzyzanowski's novels; in this collection we truly admire the author as a master storyteller. JerzyJ. Maciuszko Baldwin-WallaceCollege Marita Liab0. Under brua. Oslo. Gyldendal Norsk. 2006. 231 pages. Kr. 299. isbn82-05-35356-5
MaritaLiab0(b. 1971)had her debut with the novel Tempusfugit (1999), which depictsdifficultiesin the love life of backpackersin Guatemala. Brytning (2000; Refractions)deals with similarthemes;it takes its title from the complicated relationship
that exists between its several differentnarrators,the most important of which is dead and speaks from within her casket. Han liker meg (2001;He likes me) presents a psychodrama about the relationship between a teacherand eight of his adult students,while Mafia(2004)is a cutting critiqueof Westerndecadence, set among backpackersin SoutheastAsia. Underbrua(Below the bridge) avoids the exotic locales of some of Liabo'searlierworks. Set in the cities of Bergen,Oslo, and Tromso, as well as in ruralWesternNorway, it tells the story of a bald computer programmer named Simon and the teacherSunniva,who saves him from freezing to death under the bridge that connects Tromso to the mainland. Simon, who is overworked and wants to quit his job, had gotten drunk and planned to end it all quickly in the cold and snow. After sobering up- at least temporarily- he becomes fascinated with his rescuer and tries to locate her in Oslo, where she works. Sunniva, who is victimized in an abusive relationship with a
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Swedish man namedJohan,is freed when Simonbringsthe police to her apartment,where Johan had tied her up while engaging in kinky sex with anotherwoman. A story of both personal and social pathologies, Underbruanext takes Simon and Sunniva to visit Simon'sfamily at his hometown in WesternNorway. Wishingto create a new life, Simon has quit his prestigious job and sold his expensive condominiumin Oslo. As the couple interactswith Simon's parents and brother,however,Simon'svery troubledpast is graduallyrevealed to the reader,who is left to wonder how a man in that situation,and in his midthirties,will find the resolve to createany kind of decent life. Liabo's point may well be, in fact,thatlife in contemporaryurban Norway has become so dysfunctional that human happiness has become almost impossible to realize. Simon'sand Sunniva'stroubles continueto the book'slastpage, and the only glimmer of hope appears when Simon'sfamily steps in to try and save theirrelationship. Underbruais thus a story with considerablepathos,but Liaboalso createsmany comic situations.Her superb imaginative ability man-
ifests itself both in the novel's plot and figuration,but above all in the linguistic creativitywith which she has endowed her protagonist, on whom the story is focused. Simon's Norwegian is both extremely colloquial and highly creative,and his best hope for futurehappinessmay well lie in the artistrywith which he is able to express his idiosyncratic reality. Jan Sjdvik University of Washington Anne Tyler. Digging to America. New York. Knopf. 2006. 277 pages. $24.95. isbn0-307-26394-0
The world accordingto Anne Tyler is as small as an individual mind and as large as the society it keeps. In her novels, the society it keeps tends to be an extended family, interlockingwith friends'extended families. Digging to America focuses
on two extended families, one of first- and second-generation Iranian immigrants,the other of two generations of Americans. They are brought together unexpectedly through their adoption of babies from Korea;indeed, they meet at Baltimore-Washington Airport, where they are waiting for the infants to be delivered. A yearly celebration of Arrival Day opens each family to the foods, customs, and ultimatelyculturesof the other. The mothers become best friends, the two girls become like cousins, and even grandparentsare drawn into the circle. Once her world is established, Tyler is interested in viewing it from within, from differentcharacters' points of view. Events unfold with increasing richness as one becomes aware of each character's
perspective, even though Tyler eschews the modernist practice of multiple perspectives on certain events. It works, in part, because there are really no large, dramatic events thatdemandsuch treatment. Reflectionson relationshipsand the changesin people blendwith scenes of social interaction. Throughout the plot, charactersadvance to the foregroundor recede, but they are always on stage. Characters'professional lives are largely exterior to family concerns, and, in a real sense, events (and chapters)- like life- don't concludememorably. Through their interrelationships, a familiarAmericanconcern with independence versus ties to others emerges. The title of the novel is based on one Koreangirl's wondering if children from the other side of the earth could dig through to her side. Her grandfather imagines with her how they'd "pop out of the ground" and join their American counterpartsin a playground.Interestingly,the Iranian adultswho have made theirway to Americafeel thatmore digging is necessaryon both sides beforetheir two culturescan integrate. Repeatedly,Iranianscomment on Americanfoibles,theirfumbling efforts to be tolerant and accepting while presumingto know their foreignfriends'adjustmentdifficulties. Most troublingfor the Iranians (and for Americanreaders)are the presumptions that all differences are minor or can be resolved into an American Way, where sharing and knowing are assumedto be the means to happiness. One character complainsthather Americanfriend takes up too much "room" and wants her to be large, too, but ends up makingher feel small.Whilenot (continued on page 6y)
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Guy Delisle. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China. Helge Dascher, tr. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2006. 148 pages, ill. $19.95. isbn 1-894937-79-1
"The cleanness of Shenzhen's illustration evokes a whimsical feel that downplays the book's cynicism. Though his drawing style is simple, Delisle's work vividly conveys the nuanced cityscape of Shenzhen."
Shenzhenis Guy Delisle's second Asian travelogue to be translatedfrom Frenchinto English.Likeits English-language predecessorPyongyang:A Journeyin NorthKorea(Drawnand Quarterly,2005),Shenzhenis a basicallychronologicalrecounting of the author's fish-out-of-water experiencesin Asia. At Shenzhen'sbeginning, Delisle remarksthat time had blocked out the negative portion of his Chinese memories.He writes, "I rediscover what I'd forgotten:the smells, the noise, the crowds, the dirt everywhere/' The vignettes that follow seem to be variationsof that theme. Like Pyongyang,the book's plot is minimal. Delisle is sent to Shenzhenby his employer,a Frenchanimationstudio, to supervise outsourced animation. The anecdotal method of narrationsometimes disrupts the story's movement with awkwardtransitions.Thoughthe authorwrites the illustrated anecdote well, the book's lack of continuous narrativediscouragesa completeportrayalof his characters.Too often, the Chinesehe encountersaremerelyamusing,almostsilly. When comparedto the Koreansof Pyongyang,they are too often flat. Delisle is carefulnot to take his autobiographicalcharacter too seriouslyeither.Illustratedas the book's only character with a protrudingnose, he mocks his own trips to the gym and his limitedskill in maneuveringhis bike throughthe thousands of otherbicyclerson Shenzhen'sstreets. Delisle'scynicismdrives the book'shumorbut also focuses primarilyon what he perceivesto be the negativeaspectsof China.Insteadof activelyengagingChineseculture,he focuses on his status as a culturaloutsider. Shenzhen'shumor largely relies on the intercultural awkwardness Delisle conjuresby his unwillingness to accommodatethe everyday happenings illustrationevokes of Chineselife. The cleannessof Shenzhen's a whimsical feel that downplays the book's cynicism.Though his drawingstyle is simple, Delisle'swork vividly conveys the nuanced cityscapeof Shenzhen. Despite its occasionalflaws, primarilythe flatnessof most of the Chinese characters,Shenzhensucceeds as a cynically humorousmeditationon the natureof being an outsider.Guy Delisle offersWesternreinterpretations of the Chineselifestyle. He goes so far as to transposeDante's levels of hell to China. After a weekend spent in the excellentcafes of Canton,closer to Infernothan Shenzhen,his returnto a city that only serves instant coffee is depressing. His reactionis typical Delisle: "I just hope they don't serve instantcoffee in Limbo." Ling Chuan-Yao& David Shook University of Oklahoma
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MiriamKatin.We Are On Our Own: A Memoir. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2006. 122 + 7 unnumbered pages, ill. Can$24.95/US$19.95. isbn 1-896597-20-3
For many who were reared on flimsy, newsprint comic books as a means to while away rainy Saturdayafternoons,the appearanceof Art Spiegelman'sMaus I a little over twenty years ago was a revelation.In the years since, and especially recently, many sophisticated and literary graphic novels have been published, and with WeAre On OurOwn,her first work, MiriamKatinhas entered the top tier of graphicnovelists. SubtitledA Memoir,Katin'sstirringwork deftly goes to the heart of one family's Holocaust experience,and yet along the way this becomes a universal tale of parenthood,persecution,loss, and redemption.Set in Budapestand the Hungariancountryside,the storybegins in 1944when the Jewishpopulation of Hungarywas being denied simple rights,such as owning a dog. As the tale of the fleeing motherand child unfolds, Katin'selegant and nuanced gray drawings evoke both children's-bookillustrationsand fineartdrawings.She expertlyestablishesnarrativethroughsimple panels and then swiftly moves it along or creates energyby breakingout of the frame;in so doing, she indicatesthe precariousnessof orderin our lives. The story of Lisa and her mother,Esther,who risks everything to save herself and her child while her husbandis at war, follows a path known to many familiarwith Holocausttales:escape, concealment,impoverishment,violence,and, luckily,some few kindnessesalong the way. Everysuch story is the same yet singular, and Katin'scharactersare emphaticallywell drawn, in both meaningsof the word. As she raises a major issue for survivorsand their children- can faith in God survive such an ordeal?- she also createsa poignant mother-daughterrelationshipin the face of almostindescribablehardshipand travail.And since such ordeals do not fade frommemoryeven with happy endings, Katinbringsthe readerinto the vibrantpresentby using color to illustratethe mostly serene adult circumstancesof Lisawith her own child. The glory of the graphicnovel lies with its ability to move quicklyvia image and to provide irony and commentwithout language.Katinexcels at these juxtapositions.Forexample,at one point Estherand Lisaare racingthroughthe night in frigid,snowy weather,strugglingto stay togetherand to save theirlives. Thisharrowing gray page is set adjacentto a blaze of autumnalpanels where the adult Lisa and her child are playing at hide and seek. Lisa'spast haunts every such moment. WeAre On Our Ownprovides great satisfactionboth visually and emotionally,as it beckons the reader back for anotherand then anotherlook. What is even more gratifyingis that every reexaminationprovides new pleasures. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University
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enlarged on, Tyler here touches on a kind of social imperialismborn out of good intentions. A subtheme emerges in the sense that even American families can feel the need to dig to the America as it is representedin the popular media. This comes up in the novel throughthe children'sfeeling that no matter what their parents had done, they hadn't had a fully significantChristmas,as definedby those televisionfamilies. Ultimately, Digging to America
concludes quite satisfactorily for the reader who has entered Anne Tyler's world. It is a world where people are valued, where affection and even joy can arrive unexpectedly. Those readerswill both sense and even hope that such a world is more real than the nightly news. W. M. Hagen OklahomaBaptist University
Abdourahman A. Waberi. Aux EtatsUnis d'Afrique. Paris.J. C. Lattes. 2006. 233 pages. €15. isbn2-7096-2813-9
In Aux Etats-Unis d'Afrique, his
sixth work of fiction, Djiboutian author AbdourahmanWaberi creates a farcicalworld in which Africa is rich and prosperous, attracting many immigrantsfrom Europeand America- continentsdevastatedby war and disease. Waberi humorously invents an Africa to which many Western accomplishments, inventions,and productsare attributed. The first man on the moon was EzraMapanza,a majorfilm is A Vestde Bangui(with a JamesDean (the Maputomuseclone),MAAMM um of Africanart in Mozambique) is compared to the Grand Palais; consumers can buy Nka furnishings, McDiop burgers, Neguscafe, and HadjaDaas ice cream.
The novel resembles an eighteenth-century philosophical tale, with its epigraphsintroducingeach chapter,its emphasison themesand settingsratherthanplot and character, its satiricnarrativevoice. Maya, a poor child fromNormandy,saved from destitution by Docteur Papa, a humanitarian aid worker from Eritrea,is only graduallyawarethat she does not look like her African playmates. After she becomes an artist,she decides to visit her native land, where she is shocked by the poverty and crime and amused by the inconsistencies of the French language. She also becomes more awareof the miserableconditionsof the Europeanimmigrantsin Africa. Thenarratordescribeshis compatriots' scorn of the tribal enmities between Flemishand Walloons in Belgium and of the retrograde religionsin Europe- Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. There are many instancesof how Western commentarieson African tribalism and animism could be reversed. The reversalof Africaand the West serves to disorient the reader (presumably, as with most African literaturepublishedin France,a European or Americanreader),making one aware of the stereotypesWesterners accept when thinking about othercultures. Waberi's Africa is no better than the West. Its intellectualsare too proud,consumerismis rampant, emigrants are treated much as the West has treatedAfricans.Satirically imitating the policies of Nicolas Sarkozy,the Frenchministerof the interior, a television commentator talksaboutconductingemigrantsto the borders:"D'abordillegaux,puis semi-legaux, enfin para-legaux et ainsi de suite." Worse, one official puts two Europeanprisonersin an
enclosure, promising freedom to the one who kills the other! AbdourahmanWaberi'stheme is the need for all peoples to overcome "communalism,"the pride in belonging to any group (racial, religious, or regional)that leads to hatred of others. The novel ends with the hope thatthroughart,literature, and love, the divisiveness of humankindcan be reduced, a goal to which Aux Etats-Unis d'Afrique,
through its clever satiric treatment of ethnicstereotypes,contributes. Adele King Fans Zoe Wicomb. Playing in the Light. New York. New Press (W.W. Norton, distr.). 2006. 218 pages. $24.95. isbn 1-59558-047-6
"I hate traveling," Claude LeviStrauss quips at the beginning of Tristestropiques.MarionCampbell, owner of MCTraveland the focus of Zoe Wicomb'sthird novel, doesn't like to travel, either. Only when she leaves her office in Cape Town, though, and her luxury flat on the sea facing RobbenIsland, does she discoversomethingaboutthe South Africain which she lives. Playing in the Light isn't unique
in representing the descent into one's past, and one's self, by the metaphor of travel. Marion steps into her past by motoring to Wuppertal,and she experiencesan intuitive glimpse into the future of the "New South Africa"at the novel's end after returningfrom a solitary journeyto Europe. Besides directing a successful travel agency, Marioncares for her aging Afrikaans father, John, who has troubleboth walking and urinating. In his early thirties, he migratedto CapeTown froma farm in the Karoo,but he never adjusted
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to urbanlife. He was a "trafficcop" and, being a raw recruit, didn't contradicthis superior,who wrote "Kempel"when John gave his last name. The title of Wicomb's novel could have been PlayingWhite.That is the shocking truth Marionlearns about the conduct of her defunct mother, Helen. Traveling with young Brenda Mackay, who lives in Bonteheuweland is the only colored employee on her staff,Marion learns, during a Ulysses-like recognition scene in Wuppertal, that her mother only allowed Marion's grandmother, called "Tokkie,"to visit their house once a week. To prevent neighbors from identifying her dark-skinnedmother,Helen had her enter through the back door.Marion'sshockat havingbeen brought up white and discovering she's colored, her personal parallel to the historicalverities uncovered by the TRC,cause Marion swollen feet- her mother suffered from a foot ailment, too- and scream-ridden nightmares. Marion's discomfort at what her companion,Geoff Geldenhuys, might think pushes her to distance herself from him, and to consider selling MCTravel.Ultimately, she decides to go to Europe alone and has Brendarun the company.Traveling, she realizes she betrayedher childhood friend, Annie Boshoff, when she was eight years old, because Mr. Boshoff, a "playwhite," had wanted to be reclassified as colored.In Scotland,elderly Dougie, a man of modest means, gives her a tartanfor her seemingly Scottishfather. Marion's re-entranceinto the new South Africawas auspiciously inaugurated at the airport when a man pushing a luggage buggy
quickly picked Geoff's lock, allowing him to retrieve the keys he'd accidentally left dangling inside. Disdainfully,the man accepted the ten-rand tip Marion offered. Her returnwas celebratedby a surprise party. The party- its blended company and harmonious humorrepresents Wicomb's vision of the "New South Africa."Successful at running the company, Brendahad not taken up with Geoff as Marion suspected. Brenda's mother, with whom Brenda lives in the same room although no longer on the same mattress,prepareslocal delicacies. The barbarities uncovered by the TRCseem passe as Marion, Brenda, her mother, Geoff, John, John's sister, and Marion's Afrikaaner office staff sit around telling jokes and making no more reference to the country's going to the dogs: "Woof,woof," as Brenda would say. Biko is not mentioned. Mandela is praised once at the housewarming party. In the spirit of reconciliation, Marion decides to get a new place and move in with her fast-declining father.1Such is Zoe Wicomb'svision of the "New South Africa." Blowing in off the Cape of Good Hope, her novel is a fresh wind in the world of fiction. RobertH. McCormick FranklinCollege,Switzerland Yang Guija. Strength from Sorrow. Youngju Ryu, tr. Merrick, New York. Cross-Cultural Communications. 2005. 223 pages. $25. isbn0-89304-740-6
Reflecting on the many novels and short-story collections by Korean writers I have read over the past two decades, I am struck by the number of works that fall into the categoryof "scarliterature."Characters suffer,endure, survive, but the
Yang Guija wounds never heal. Strengthfrom Sorrow,by Yang Guija,adds to the body of works in this category. Fromwhere do the wounds come? From the annexation of Korea in 1910 by the Japanese,World War II (when Koreabecame part of the Japanesewar machine),the Korean War, which divided a country and families, rapid modernizationand a breakdown of tradition, a ruthless dictator followed by an even more ruthless one, which gave rise to rebellion,suppression,and more rebellion.The stories in this recent collection have their roots in all these events. The strongestand most hauntare three linked tales: stories ing "MountainFlowers,""TheRoad to CheonmaTomb,"and "An Opportunist."The narratorreflectson the life of his father,who workedforthe Japanese,lost his land in the North, and with the loss, his will to live. During the 1980s, the son is taken in by the police and tortured.He signs an oath never to reveal what has happened to him, and thus he broods over his misfortune.Much later, long after his release, when he is on an outing with his family, he runs into one of his torturers.He is forced to exchange pleasantries (continued on page 71)
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Marjane Satrapl. Chicken with Plums. Anjali Singh, tr. New York. Pantheon. 2006. 84 pages, ill. $16.95. isbn 0-37542415-6
MarjaneSatrapiis most famous for her two-partautobiTheStoryofa Childhood (2003) ographicalwork,Persepolis: and Persepolis II:TheStoryofa Return(2004).She followed books with the less up the criticallyacclaimedPersepolis well-receivedEmbroideries (2005),the title of which refers to genital reconstructivesurgery, a practice in vogue among a sexually active female populationin a culture that stronglydiscouragespremaritalsex. and Chickenwith Plums do Although Embroideries not focus on Satrapi'salterego, Marji,Satrapidoes insert her in the texts as an observer.In Embroideries, an adult Marjilistens as her mother,her grandmother,and their friends exchange confidencesabout their own and others' sexual exploits;in Chickenwith Plums,she makes a cameo appearancein the middle of the story. Satrapi's work thus has a self-referentialquality as each text discloses anotherpiece of her familyhistory. ChickenwithPlumsshareswith Persepolis an effective of and strategy blending private public history, a common featureof postcolonialtexts. While in the Persepolis books the Iranianrevolutionprovides the political and historicalcontext, Chickenwith Plumshearkensback to another crucial time in Iranianhistory: the 1953 CIAbacked coup d'etat that overthrew the government of PrimeMinisterMohammadMossadeghand thwartedits effortsto nationalizeIranianoil. This key moment in Iranianhistory is one of the oft-citedreasonsfor the deep-seated hostility of many Iranianstoward the U.S. government.The story of ChickenwithPlumsunfolds in 1958during a time of generalpolitical disillusionmentin Iran.While the despondentpolitical scene serves as backdrop,the story's main focus is the life and eventualsuicide of Satrapi'sgreat-uncle,musicianNasser Ali Khan. Thebook is divided into nine sections.The firstoffersa quicksynopsis of Nasser Ali Khan'slast few monthsalive. We see him embarkon a quest to replacehis beloved Tar(an Iranianstring instrument),which his wife breaksduring a bitterargument.Unable to find a satisfactorysubstitute,he locks himself in his room, lies on his bed, and prepares to die. The rest of the story consists of a breakdownof each day before his death. One of the narrativestyles Satrapi employs in this text is an effective flashbackand flash-forwardtechniquethrough multiple perspectivesas the same story is told by differentcharacterswith varying results. One of the most strikingpanels is the full-pageillustrationof Nasser Ali Khan'sgravesite;the captionreads:"All those who had known him were present on that day." This panel appearsat the end of the first section and is reproduced at the end of the book, but with a difference.At the end of the first chapter,we see a gatheringof people at the gravesite,their faces mournful,with the exception of one woman whose face is covered with a handkerchief.At the end of the book, all the figures- and their faces- are shaded black except for the woman whose face was previously coveredby a handkerchief.This time she stands out since hers is the only visible face, and she is weeping. In the story that unfolds between these two panels, we discover that she is Irane,Nasser Ali's great love. Her fatherforbadeher from marryinga musician,so he poured his love for her into his beloved Tar,the very same Tarthat his wife would eventuallybreak. In ChickenwithPlums,MarjaneSatrapiweaves togethermultipleperspectivesand competingnarrativesto present a powerfullynuancedstory aboutpassion, idealism, and disillusionmentin love, art,and politics. NimaNaghibi RyersonUniversity
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> Anders Brekhus Nilsen. Monologues for the Coming Plague. Seattle, Washington. Fantagraphics (Turnaround, distr.). 2006. 260 pages, ill. $18.95. isbn 1-56097-718-3
Monologues for the ComingPlague begins with the line,
"Could you please slip into something more comfortable?"and ends with, "David:Yeah.I can relateto that/' In between those two lines are several vignettes- some featuringan old woman and a pigeon conversing,others with a man with a scribbledline for a head- that cover such topics as semiotics, Oprah, terrorism,the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and Tide laundry detergent. Sure,the topics seem randomand incoherent,but, as the checkliston the back cover explains,this graphic novel belongs to the genre of absurdistart comics (think Samuel Beckettand Andre Bretonmeet CharlesSchulz and Art Spiegelman).
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"I've always worked in sketchbooks, but I had lost the habit and my way of working had become very slow and deliberate. While waiting in the airport ... I found myself absorbed in a series of one-panel gags about a woman feeding a bird, brainstorming captions and watching ideas follow/'
departurein style from Anders BrekhusNilsen's previous work, the award-winningDogsand Water(2005).As he has said, "I've always worked in sketchbooks,but I had lost the habit and my way of working had become very slow and deliberate.While waiting in the airport ... I found myself absorbedin a series of one-panelgags about a woman feeding a bird, brainstormingcaptions and watching ideas follow/' This would explain why much of the art in the book is drawn as if the artisthad just enough time for a quick draft in his sketchbookor, as the back cover once again offers,stream-of-consciousness image generation.The book is split into two paper stocks- the first is a heavy, gray stock, the other is a regularwhite stock- to support the theme of drawings from a sketchbook. The combinationof absurdistskits and surrealistart makes Monologuesfor the Coming Plague a difficult book
to understandfor a readerwhose only experiencewith comics might be from the childhood treasuresof Action Comics, The Amazing Spiderman, or even the Pulitzer
Prize-winning graphicnovel Maus,but, as with Beckett and Breton,Nilsen's graphicnovel offers funny and, at times, poignant insights into politics, religion, and pop culture. Monologues for the Coming Plague achieves a
wondrous thing:throughabsurdcomics involving talking dogs, flying men, and a brief appearancefrom the twelve-memberMexicanmusical group Los Angeles de Charly,Anders BrekhusNilsen points out the absurdities in life that often don't make sense until viewed from a distortedfun-housemirror. ArmandoCelayo University of Oklahoma
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in orderto demonstratethat he has complied with his oath of secrecy. He asks himself, "Can there be a new beginning for me? Can I start " again? The reader is left without an answer. These three stories make Strengthfrom Sorrow a very strong collection. Bonnie R. Crown InternationalLiterature& Arts Program,New YorkCity
VERSE Andres Ehin. Moose Beetle Swallow. PatrickCotter with Taavi Tatsi, trs. Cork, Ireland. Southword. 2005 (released 2006). 64 pages, isbn 1-905002-13-0
To judgefromthe text on the book's cover, one might think that Andres Ehin (b. 1940), a noted contemporary Estonian poet has previously publishedat least five collectionsof poetry in English.Alas, such is not the case. Ehin has, indeed, been a very prolificpoet, but all his books prior to Moose Beetle Swallow have
been published in Estonia, in his native Estonian.Most poets of the vast eastern part of Europe still remainquite unknown in the West. PatrickCotter,a poet himself, advocates in his foreword the type of translationhe has applied for the text. It means creating poetic versions in the target language- not necessarily having knowledge of the originallanguage but just relying on prose translationsmade by someone else. In the present volume, intermediate prose translations have been preparedby Taavi Tatsi.In the final part of the book, a cycle of haikushave been translated directlyby the poet himself. Indeed, this approachworks. Cotter'spoetic versions read quite well and are,at the same time,nota-
bly close to the original Estonian texts. His task has been facilitated by the fact that Ehin has written the greater part of his poetry in a rhymelessfree verse. A related question is to what extent the present selection allows the English reader to grasp the essence of Ehin'spoetry.MooseBeetle Swallowdoes not coincide even roughly with any of Ehin'soriginal collections in Estonian.It does not provide any data as to when the poems were originallypublished. Out of a total of some fifty poems in the English selection, about fifteenbelong to Ehin'slatest verse collection in Estonian,Palutederja mutrikorjaja(2004; Heath cock
and collector of female screws), while the rest have been picked up from earlier published appearances. Moose Beetle Swallow is thus
an anthologyconsciouslydevoid of chronology. I am afraidEhin'ssurrealismin the collection'sinitialsectionwould make little sense to a foreignreader. The opening poem, "deep, below ground/' comparing f Estonians and Cherokees,bears some resemblance to Jaan Kaplinski'spoetry. However, Ehin lacks Kaplinski's fundamentalism in searching for humanity's obscure harmonious origins in life's totality. I would rather advise a foreign reader to start reading the book toward the back, where Ehin says that "poetry is not a sign / poetry is lunatic nocturnal somnambulism"(p. 56). After that, it would be worthwhile to read carefullya long poem originally written in 1966, "Dusk in the Snowfields." The essential Ehin is there. Playful, humoristic, ironic, chaotic, capable of bright sudden metaphors, responding to life's absurditywith an absurdpalette of images and language, despising all
"officialdom"and everything definite, sometimes grotesque, sometimes too light, but still someone who knows in his depths, to quote one of his haikus, that "Theviolin of autumn- / a tree leafless from sadness / chimes frailly." Jiiri Talvet University of Tartu Abdellatif Laabi. Ecris la vie. Paris. La Difference. 2005. 157 pages. €15. isbn 2-7291-1576-5
Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laabi first came into prominencethrough his work with Souffles,an avantgarde journal he founded in 1966. His commitmentto the journaldedicated to cultural and intellectual renewalin the Maghrebearnedhim a prison stint from 1972 to 1980 and an eventual exile in Francein 1985. Ecris la vie is the latest in a long line of socially conscious literary endeavorsby this indefatigable activist, poet, novelist, raconteur, epistolarian, playwright, essayist, translator,and self-dubbed "fanatique de notre Espece." Ecrisla vie is a daring castigation of the caretakersof the industry of evil, those Laabi refers to as possessing "les technologiesdes satans abhorres." Expressing his dream of "discoveringthe source of evil" (decouvrir la source du mal), the poet asserts that the only journey worth undertaking is the one to the center of humanity. In true humanistic spirit, this voyage into the center of humankind is not simply to discover the origins of evil but mainly to restore to humanityits dignity,which is being constantlydesecratedby purveyors of hate (whetherindividuals,terrorist groups, or entire governments). Whetherhe is pleading the cause of the "excludedthirdof humanity"or denouncing the senseless violence
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unleashedupon the privilegedfirst, Laabi'slove for humankindknows no bounds, harborsno discrimination. People,in spite of theirmyriad differences, are united in Laabi's workby a sharedhope and need for love, liberty,and dignity. The collection is divided into ten sections of varying lengths. While all the sections deal with the same generaltopic of evil in all its spatial-temporalmanifestations, four of them touch more specifically on some concrete contemporary manifestationsof evil. These are: "Loinde Bagdad"(on the U.S. invasion of Iraq),"Gensde Madrid, Pardon" (on the March 2004 Madrid train bombings), "La terre s'ouvre et t'acccueille"(in memory of TaharDjaout,the Algerianjournalist and writer assassinated in 1993by the fundamentalistArmed Islamic Group), "Lettrea Florence Aubenas"(FlorenceAubenasbeing the Frenchcorrespondentthat was kidnappedand held for 157 days in 2005in Baghdad).Catalogingthese and other monstrous acts, Laabi never ceases to exhort readers to action and to remind them that the battle for life and freedom is a constantone. Ecris la vie is a joy to read, even when its subjectmatteris not particularlyjoyful. A highly oral and lyrical style lends a powerful and lively cadence to the poems. With the exception of a handful, the poems are largely devoid of punctuation.This,in additionto the nature of the free verse used, further underscoresAbdellatifLaabi's refusal to be constrainedby blind adherenceto any particularliterary registeror ideology. MohamedKamara Washington& Lee University
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Sara Pujol Russell. The Poetry of Sara Pujol Russell. Noel Valis, tr. & intro. Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Susquehanna University Press (Associated University Presses, distr.). 2005. 123 pages. $34.50. isbn 1-57591-099-3
This selection of poemsby the contemporaryCatalanpoet Sara Pujol Russell was translatedinto English by Noel Valis, a scholarknown for her contributionsto modern Spanish literary and cultural studies, including her recent, award-winning volume The Culture of Cursileria: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class
in ModernSpain.For this bilingual anthology, Valis selected poems from PujolRussell'sbooks in Spanish, Elfuego tiendesu aire (1999) and Intacto asombroen la luz del silencio / El silencio del loto, la luz de las rosas
(2001), and some of these poems were originally written in Catalan. In addition, there are five selections from the poet's most recent work, Para decir si a la carencia, si a la naranja, al azafrdn en el pan
(2004).The purpose of this anthology is to introduce Pujol Russell's unique poetry to English-speaking readers- it has been translated to French, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Chinese,and Italian. PujolRussell's"highlyconceptualized, metaphysical"verse has been called a poetry of contemplation by Birute Ciplijauskaite.It is intimate yet strange, humorous, and perplexing;it is ambiguousand subversive in its self-referentiality. Valis notes one characteristicof this poetry is that it "attemptsto erase ... or alter, the fundamentaldistinction between language and the real, or being." As a consequence, in PujolRussell'spoetic world even the reader's usual point of reference- the poetic voice or the "I" that speaks- is unstable: "I begin where the word begins,"writes the
poet, underscoringthe complexity and the unnaturalizedrelationship between the self, the word, and the world. However, there is a world behind these seemingly disconnected signs, for Pujol Russell's imagery is highly traditionaleven if the poet's use of language is not; and the self, its relationto the world,and its relationto othersare characteristic legacies of romanticism.Indeed, this is verse that contemplateslife through the word, that mediates life, thought, sensations, emotions, and desiresthroughthe creativeuse of language, wresting abstractconcepts into intimatevivencias.Of the abstractword, PujolRussellwrites: "I know the world through you and through you I live it. / I live when you give me life, I am saved when you save me." This is poetry that celebrates, at times, the fullness of the moment, of being one with one's place in a given point in time, recalling the early poetry of Jorge Guillen that proclaimsa joie de vivre in the seemingly inconsequential. Pujol Russell's verse also rehearseslife's heartfeltlosses. Forthe bilingualreader,poetry in translationfrequently seems an odd couplingof the foreignwith the familiar; however, Pujol Russell's poetry, written in long lines of free verse with frequent enjambment, appearsparagraphlikeon the page; and since rhyme and meter are not elements of the original verse, the translationinto Englishworks well. Noel Valis has provided a compelling introductionwith an essential selected bibliography,and this first anthology of Sara Pujol Russell's poetry in Englishshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in originaland intriguingnew poetry from Spain. BruceA. Boggs University of Oklahoma
Milan Rufus. And That's the Truth / A to je pravda. Milan Richter & David L. Cooper, eds. Ewald Osers and Viera & James Sutherland-Smith, trs. Koloman Sokol, ill. Wauchonda, Illinois. Bolchazy-Carducci. 2006. 146 pages. $25. isbn0-86516-509-2
The translators7 preface to And That's the Truth notes recurring images of bread and water, with sacramental overtones, in Milan Rufus's poetry, but perhaps more striking- in part because of Koloman Sokol's drawings of sculptors and their work- is the emphasis on stone. In "Rodin'sLovers/' love is the chisel, and in "What Is A poem?" the answer is that "the poem is greater than the word" because it is "Not a stone. A statue. Lot's wife. / that's a poem." In "Carpenters,"the task is "to hack throughinto beauty." Throughout the collection, selected from twenty volumes of his ceuvre, Rufus emphasizes the struggle not only with artisticcreation but with destiny. Like some Englishmodernists,he feels that,in literatureas in life, "all roads lead to silence."A path thatonce seemed to lead to God now "leads to the unknown." Suffering, as inexplicable as that in the poetry of ThomasHardy (whose short lines and simple language offer some basis of comparison for the anglophone reader), is somehow, unlike Hardy's, redemptive. In "Lines,"where the extended figure is employed most successfully, markings on the face become grooves in a recordfor the wearer to "listen to / his master's voice.""Thus"echoes GerardManley Hopkins's "generations have trod / have trod / have trod,"and although Rufus cannot praise the glory of God, he concludes that hunger,neithertoo greatnor too lit-
tle, offers a space in which humanity can eat and love. Less effectiveis "Visitors,"in which hunger, death, poverty, and worry find consolation in the fact that "Theearthcame to us and broughtflowers." The next line, "And that's the truth,"serves better as title to this volume than as conclusion to the poem. Perhaps too much aware of his position as "a kind of national conscience for Slovakia and its people"- Milan Richter'swordsRufus too often flattenshis endings with didacticgeneralizations. English-speakingreaders may be missing something in translation, for many of the poems do not seem to generate effective internal rhythms. Perhaps Milan Rufus's poems in Englishare best read singly, as meditationsratherthan lyrics. Seen this way, they bring a valuable new note into poetry in English. RobertMurray Davis University of Oklahoma Wistawa Szymborska. Monologue of a Dog: New Poems. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisiaw Barahczak, trs. BillyCollins, foreword. Orlando, Florida. Harcourt. 2006 (© 2005). xiv + 96 pages. $22. isbn0-15-101220-2
Nobel Prize-winnerWislawaSzymborska's latest collection of poems contains a few older pieces as well as a handful of new poems in her signature style: the poet shuttles between the naive questions that make a mystery, sometimes a miracle, out of life, and the simple idiosyncraticroutine that is living. When one reads a Szymborska poem, both of these poles are dramatized with infinite compassion. One of the greatest accomplishments of this poetry is the way it forces us to open our eyes to the secularwonders of daily life. These
includestatesof imagination;Szymborska'spoems continue to delight in the way they takethe existenceof fanciful states absolutely seriously. Reality and imagination are in a playful competition- each has the potential to outstrip the other. In one poem, the speaker remembers her childhoodfearof being trapped underwaterin a bottomlesspuddle that would eventually dry up and seal her under the earth.In the final stanza,she tells us, "Understanding came only later: / not all misadventures / fit within the world's laws / and even if they wanted to, / they couldn't happen." The misadventureis, of course, real- it has been imagined,has it not?It has been experiencedwithin the mind and produced a counterreaction;it has been dramatizedfor us so we could experience it, too. It simply cannot occur in the exclusionary system of "theworld's laws," yet it exists for all that.Thereis a division between what happens and what we know in our minds by means of affect (the child's fear).This simple little poem leads one to meditateon the division between ontology and epistemology, between empirical and affectiveknowledge.
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dinary, and sometimes agonizing, conclusion.Still, Wislawa Szymborska's disillusions are communicated with such gentle humor,such devastatingly precise concreteness, that one cannot help but assent to her poetic acts. This is truly poetry that both instructsand delights.
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Miguel Torga. Iberian Poems. George Monteiro, tr. & intro. Providence, Rhode Island. Gavea-Brown. 2005. 152 pages. $15. isbn0-943722-33-0
Szymborska's repeated concern is the imagined surplus of reality, which cannot be contained in the "laws"that we form to make sense of our surroundings.A little girl pulls at a tablecloth out of a desire to upset the boundary line between "things that don't move by themselves" and those that do. Her curiosity pre- and postdates Newtonian physics, as an eternal urge towardquestioningthat is one of Szymborska's most endearing qualities.As Billy Collins writes in the foreword, her existential wonder strips us of our presumptuousness. She does this by invertingour usual modes of seeing. There are "historical"poems in the collection, but a Szymborskapoem is never simply historical- it is an exercise in changing perspective.It is wonderful to have the English and Polish texts side by side, though the translationsarefaithfulenough that English-languagereaders need not feel left out of the original poems' magic. If anything, the translation is occasionally more idiomatic or colloquial than the original Polish. Szymborskawrites with a limpidity that can be both charmingand terrifying, as an ordinaryevent leads seemingly logically to an extraor-
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While Portuguese literature has enjoyed broad internationalreconsiderationfollowingthe awardingof the Nobel Prizeto JoseSaramagoin 1998,poet and prose writer Miguel Torgahas yet to join FernandoPessoa, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Lidia Jorge,and Saramagohimselfamong the ranks of recently discovered or rediscoveredwritersfromPortugal. This is a shame, because Torga's work, written over the course of a long life spanning the greaterpart of his country's agitated twentieth century, enjoys the distinction of being firmly rooted m the writer's local realitywhile remaininghighly accessibleto readers not yet familiar with Portugal and its literary expression. In his voluminous poetic output, Torga presents readers with a stark,durablevision of his country's natural and human landscape- in particular,the hardscrabblepeasant life of his home in Portugal'srural, mountainous Northeast. Torga filters his spare, direct presentation through broader preoccupations with suffering,perseverance,moral uncertainty,and the shared weight of history as well as the force of his own near-mythicpersona.Thewriter, whose real name was Adolfo Correiade Rocha,chose the pseud-
onym "Miguel Torga" in homage to two Miguels from Spanish letters- Cervantesand Unamuno- as well as the torga, a tough, resilient weed native to his province. Torga's uncompromising blend of rural description, social critique, and a uniquely humble brand of personal mythologization is on prominentdisplay in the 1965 collection PoemasIbericos(Iberian poems), composed as a meditation on a common peninsularhistorical and cultural identity. While Iberian Poems, recentlytranslatedinto English by veteran literaryscholar George Monteiro, recalls the epic register of Luis de Camoes's sixteenth-century poem Os Lusiadas and Fernando Pessoa's modernist reworking in 1934's Mensagem, Torga's collection is distinguished by its relentlesspreoccupationwith the earthlymotivationsand human costs associatedwith Portugaland Spain's former glory. Torga spells out this naturalisticimperative in the opening stanzaof "Fado"(Fate), which reads: "A people will have their fate / Cut out for them / In nature'sbook. / A destinyreserved, / Rich / Or poor, / Consonant with the tilled soil."Meanwhile,"A Largada"(Settingout) describesthe departure of the Iberian maritime explorers as the result of earthly pillaging and collectivepsychological torment,with the "anxietiesand the pine groves / Transformedinto fragilecaravels." Throughout Iberian Poems, Torgastrugglesto reconcilethe frequent brutality of Portugal's and Spain's overseas adventures with an alternate, more humane sense of Iberian identity, personified by such figures as Unamuno, Pablo Picasso, and the fictional Sancho Panza- eachof whom receivesindividual poetic tribute. Nowhere is
this conflict more apparentthan in "Camoes,"in which Torgawonders at the "grandeur"of Portugal'scelebrated literary patriarch,describing him as an "immeasurablecedar / Of the small Portuguese forest," even as he bemoans the role of Camoes as "the poet of an empire that was mad" in the Iberianimperial enterprise. With George Monteiro'snew, capably translated edition of Iberian Poems, English-speakingreaders can make theirbelated acquaintance with Miguel Torga. Among the many Portuguese writers ripe for criticalreexamination,Torga,in my opinion, is especially worthy. In his pairing of spare, naturalistic verse and complex theoretical preoccupations,Miguel Torga invokes a set of contrasts- between great mountains and tiny streams, celebratedheroes and anonymous peasants, occasional victories and continuedsuffering- thatbroadens the scope of the writer's Iberian home well beyond the long-defined bordersof Portugaland Spain. RobertPatrickNewcomb Brown University Charles Wright. Scar Tissue. New York. Farrar,Straus & Giroux. 2006. 73 pages. $22. ISBN0-374-25427-3
Scar Tissue,Charles Wright's latest collection of poems, has the same depth, verve, and complex originality we associate with his best poetry; this is the work of a master poet fully realizing his gift and is not to be missed. We find here Wright's characteristiclayering of perspectiveand techniquethe poetic equivalent of Cezanne's multipleplanes. He achievesthis in part through his characteristically variedand sometimescomplexsentence structures- my favoritebeing
his use of parallelabsolutephrases; his startlingly original metaphors; his mesmerizing,private voice; his brilliant intellect, moving freely from the universal and learned to the local and intimately personal; and his delicately nuanced emotional registers.The entiremontage of Wright'simages and techniques creates a precise resonance, an interiority and meditative timbre unmatchedby any othercontemporarypoet. One difference between this newest book by Wright and his previous work is perhaps one of degree: his usual elegiac and nostalgic strains seem even more prominentthanbefore.In the poem we read: "People "Transparencies" have died of thirst in crossing a memory. / Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, / and good for a season." Perhaps a better example is this ending to "TheWrong End of the Rainbow":"Look,we were young then, and the world would sway to our sway. / We were riverrun, we were hawk's breath. / Heart'slid, we were center'sheat at the center of things, l) Remember us as we were, amigo, / And not as we are, stretchedout at the wrong end of the rainbow, / Our feet in the clouds, / our heads in the small, still pulse-pause of age, / Gazing out of some window, still taking it all in, / Our arms aroundMemory, / Her full lips telling us just those things / she thinks we want to hear." We go to Wright's poetry because we must, because we can't quite get the fullnessof intellectand enlarged sphere of feeling found in CharlesWrightanywhereelse. Fred Dings South Carolina University of
MISCELLANEOUS Marcel Cohen. In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura. Raphael Rubinstein, tr. Jerusalem. Ibis. 2006. 119 pages. $13.95. isbn 96590125-4-3
Marcel Cohen wrote this text in 1981 in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish,or Djudyo, the language of the Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain in 1492), addressing it to his friend, the Spanish painter Antonio Saura (1930-98). Sixteen years later, he translatedit into French,and it is that version which Ralph Rubinstein used as the basis for his English translation.The originalLadino version is included in this volume, along with an introductionby the translator and several line drawings by Saura.Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1937 into a family only recently arrived there after having dwelled for five centuriesin Istanbul, MarcelCohendescribeshimself as a 'TurkishSephardi."His choice to write in Ladino, the language that echoed through his childhood but which he himself had never actually practiced as a writer, is a strategicone. It is also a very pungent one. "I'd like to write to you in Djudyo/' he tells Saura,"before the language of my ancestors is completelyextinguished."How can a language die, he wonders, and what partof culturedies along with it? Cohen points out that he is the last surviving member of his family to understand Ladino- and in point of bitter fact, he lost most of his family soon after arriving in France,in the Holocaust. Choosing to write in Ladino, "deathspeaksthroughyourmouth," Cohen suggests; and it is death in its various guises that looms most darklyhere, as Cohenmourns
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both individuals and the people to whom they belonged. Silence, too, is a kind of death, as is forgetting. Yet speech and remembrancecan testify to loss, Cohen wagers, in ways that otherkinds of memorials cannot. Words themselves contain tracesof the people who once used them in their daily speech, and perhaps those traces may be distilled somehow in a text that places the quiddity of language itself on display. That is undoubtedly why Cohen decided to preserve certain key Ladino words in his French translation, glossing them in an appendix,a practicethatRubinstein has followed here.Thosewords vex the English in productive ways, calling it into question in a hybrid language whose principal tone is itself interrogative.Theyinscribeon the very page the diasporicexperience of a people that was exiled in turn from Jerusalem,from Spain, and from the great cities of the Ottoman Empire such as Salonika, zmir, Safad, and stanbul. In that perspective, Marcel Cohen's focus here is both very particular and very general.He speaks of his own exile fromwhat ought to have been his mother tongue; yet each of his utterancesserves to underscorethe broadlyexemplarycharacterof that condition,as a once-vibrantculture draws its last breathsand whispers a few final,elegiac words. WarrenMotte University of Colorado
Helene Dorion. Sous I'arche du temps. Paris. La Difference. 2005. 95 pages. €13. isbn2-7291-1578-1 . Ravir: Les lieux. Paris. La Difference. 2005. 107 pages. €14. isbn 2-7291-1575-7
Between 1986 and 2003, Helene Dorion wrote a number of short essays that attempt to determine how writing and being in the world relate one to the other.Sous l'arche du tempsregroupsand revisessome of these texts: "Habiteren poesie" (1986);"LeDetaildu poeme"(1986); "La Fenetreouverte" (1988);"Penchee pour ecrire"(1989);"Le Ciel, l'invisible et la catastrophe"(1991); "Poesiejetee sur la vie" (1991);"Le Cceurdu poeme" (1994);"Chemins de l'inconnu" (1996); "Sous l'arche du temps" (1998);"Cheminsde TOuvert" (1998); "Signes" (2001); "Ressentirla Terre"(2001);"Fragments de paysages" (2002); "Portraits d'ecriture"(2003);and "Celebrationdu vivant"(2003). What these essays share is the belief that writingis aboutreciprocity and that writing renews our ties to the world.. In toclay's material world, Dorion wants to remind us that being should not be trumped by doing and making:"Aux desordres sociaux, culturels et raciaux, aux crises politiques, economiques et ecologiques d'une civilisation divisee, la poesie repond par la continuity de l'etre et le portrait detaille d'une conscience." In Ravir: Les lieux, which won
the Prix Mallarme 2005, all five poems- "Ravir:les villes"; "Ravir: les ombres"; "Ravir:les miroirs"; "Ravir:les fenetres"; and "Ravir: les visages"- continue to privilege a poetic listening that brings the world into language- "les vagues
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avancent, resonnent / comme des syllables contrela coque"- and the writer into the world- "Voiladone ce que nous possedons / d'une ville: l'ombre qu'elle fait / dans nos corps,le battement/ au loin, le battement / proche de sa langue.o As its title suggests,Ravirattendsto what is exquisite in our exchanges with the world, which may forcibly take our breath away. Helene Dorion's careful use of language recallsthe passage of time- and its markupon us. Maryann De Julio Kent State University
Evald Flisar. Collected Plays. Vol. 1. Guilderland, New York. Texture. 2006. 624 pages. $45. isbn0-9712061-4-7
Evald Flisar,the versatileSlovenian writer, editor, and traveler,reveals in these seven of his twelve plays his ability to adapt to- and froma variety of sources and cultures. He has written radio plays for the Australian BroadcastingCommission and the BBC;he draws upon themes and characters from the Western canon, from Dostoevsky to Ibsen to Wagner and especially Shakespeare;the plays have been produced on at least three continents and have an appeal not limited to any countryor culture. As Flisarnotes in his introduction, "Most,if not all, of my central charactersaredeeply markedby the feeling of emptinessthat permeates their efforts and the world around them." Nevertheless, by seizing that emptiness, the charactershave a chance of "breakingout of the ring of futile wasting of energy and coming to terms with what cannot be avoided."
happily assumes- just before the knock on the door that announces a new judge and a new challenge to the precarious balance he has achieved with Rembrandt,Nijinski, and Yessenin. The Eleventh Planet deals with
Most of the plays use a single set in order that the charactersbe forced within these limits to create "imaginary,alternativeworlds/' to demolish those created by others, and either to retreat into fantasy or to recognize the impenetrability of the walls, mostly self-created, that prevent them from escaping. In contrastto Sartre'sNo Exit, hell is not otherpeople; it is oneself and one's illusions. Flisar seems to realize his themes most successfully in plays thathave no more than four characters.Tomorrow has echoes of Waiting for Godotin the new judge Mishkin's desire to meet the Supreme Judge and ask for direction,so that he may achieve order in the bleak Siberian landscape and not have to assume responsibilityfor a truth that he imposes with a gun. The SupremeJudge turns out to be the silent, unseen servantwhom Mishkin shoots, who has performedall the menial, life-sustaining tasks, and whose role Mishkin almost
the efforts of three vagabonds, escaped from a mental institution, to escape the "bonker,"bourgeois world and escape to a planet where their "milk of human kindness" can leaven the population. As the authoritiesapproach,however,they draw a rocketship to escape- only to realize that they've forgotten to include the motor and that bonkerism may be inescapable. Nora Nora, in which the characters are ironically aware of A Doll's House, and The Nymph Dies
are more complex in the interweaving of disguises, assumedidentities, and betrayalsand counterbetrayals and would probablybe more effective in production,as would What about Leonardo?and Uncle from America,both with largercasts. Nevertheless,all deserve to be produced. Experimental theaters and reading groups should find these plays, especially the ones with small casts, easy to produce, and their audienceswould find the plays by a significant playwright very rewarding. RobertMurray Davis University of Oklahoma Alexander Masters. Stuart: A Life Backwards. New York. Delacorte. 2006. 300 pages, ill. $20. isbn 0-38534000-1
Born in New York and educated in London and Cambridge across the Atlantic, Alexander Masters is a travel writer and illustratorwho
has been working with the homeless in England for the last five years. He gives us an authentic account of the plight of homeless people there through the study of one life in Stuart: A Life Backwards.
While campaigningfor the release of two charityworkers arrestedby the police, the author strikes up a friendship with Stuart, a fellow campaignerwhose "symbolicsense of justice . . . expressionsof hatred . . . carelessnesswith life and longing for calm" elevate him to the rank of a "biblicalcharacter"in the eyes of Masters,who delineates a panoramicview of Stuart'swretched life in his very firstbook. StuartClive Shorterwas born Stuart Turner in September 1968 in Midston,England.After his violent father abandoned the family, his mother married Paul Shorter, prompting Stuart to change his family name. His problems begin early in life when his older brother and the babysitter rape him. He is sent to a school for the disabled because he has borderlinepersonality disorder and also muscular dystrophy.These disabilities,however, do not attractsympathy from otherboys in the street.They insult him with "wobblefoot,""spaghetti legs," and "bandyboy." Not being able to swallow such indignities,he head-butts his tormentorone day. This discovery of violence changes Stuart's life forever as he relishes "thefreedomfrom weakness." At the age of eleven, Stuart runs away from home, resortingto a life of glue-sniffing,fighting, and stealing. This cripple with gypsy roots even becomes a National Frontskinhead for a time. He cannot hold down a job because he
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is drunk all day. But he catches the eye of a twenty-four-year-old night manager of a homeless shelter when he is sixteen and fathers a baby with her. The relationship peters out when he smashes "to pieces''a motorbikeshe has bought for him. One night he forcefully enters her house, sets fire to it, and threatensto kill theirson, for which he is imprisoned. But his violence continues in and out of jail. He is sent to prison again for robbing a post office. When he is finally releasedafterfour and a half years, he finds a modicum of happiness with a new girlfriendand fights to free two charity workers arrested on suspicion of allowing drugs on the premises. Thus he meets Masters, the writer who is also fighting for the same cause. When Stuart seems to be living a normal life, he is suddenly,and tragically,knocked down by a train. The authorpresents the unfortunateevents of Stuart'slife not only in apt words but also with pictures and illustrations, taking us back to his happy-go-lucky childhood from the time he meets him. Hence the subtitle:A Life Backwards.It is a biography that often reads like a gothic novel- shocking, moving, and hilariousat the same time. This is not nineteenth-centuryEngland, but the Stuartsof the kingdom certainlylive in "HardTimes/' to use a Dickensianphrase. And Alexander Mastersdeservescreditforbringing that to light. Ronny Noor University of Texas, Brownsville
Na trecem trgu: Antologija nove kratke price Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore. Srdan Papic, project coordinator. Selja Sehabovic, Olja Savicevic Ivancevic, & Jelena Angelovski, eds. Belgrade/ Kikinda. Narodna biblioteka "Jovan Popovic" /Treci Trg. 2006. 213 pages. €8.24. ISBN 86-7378-018-7
This is a superbselection of new authorsand short stories from Bosnia and Hercegovina,Croatia,and Serbia/Montenegro, each section compiled by an editor from that country. The afterword'sstress on work in a "mutually understandable language" suggests a fertile literaryscene where writers search out, admire (or detest), learn from, and react to any other artisticpersonalitiesthey can understand. Thebook was publishedin Belgrade, but it contains much more ijekavian than ekavian (or ikavian).
The stories offer other linguistic features: Dalmatian dialect; Vlado Bulic's play with local variants in "www.i-buy.hr." Mima Simic exploits gender-markingthat, like the Spanish nosotras,allows clear expression of lesbian sexuality. Other languages appear,especially Englishbut also Hungarian(Andrea Pisac's "Return to Balatonszentgorgy"); references to Amsterdam and the United States evoke exile and emigration.Some stories stress violence and war (especially those of Srdan Papic), but more do not; love and sex dominatein the stories from Bosniaand Hercegovina. The thought-provokingselection mixes more traditionalstyles with experimentalpieces, with an averageof twelve pages per author. Here is "The Visit," by Jovanka Uljarevic,in its entirety: "Goodevening.Forgiveme for disturbingyou, but you'vebeen doing thatto us for a long time, so I had to drop in and ask
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you to turndown thatdreadful music." "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was alone in the building.I didn't know you were living heretoo." "Iam not living." "No?!" "I'mjustan apparition." "But you rang at my door and I openedit. I see you. I can touchyou if I wantto." "Ithinkthat'syourproblem." Enes Halilovic's "TheSock,"a timeless parable on exile, is especially recommended. The book has an unfortunate number of typographical errors, and the review copy is missing one page. Nevertheless, the approach and realizationare cheering.Eight of the fourteenauthorsand editors are women, and any forebodingat a "formerYugoslav"anthologylifts upon seeing a Muslimname among the authorsfromSerbiaand Montenegro. The stories are almost all of high quality,and the authorsreally are new, all born between 1974and 1980. Na trecemtrgu is very much worth reading. SibelanForrester SwarthmoreCollege
graphic literature
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Speeding Bullet Comics Speeding BulletComics,located in Norman,Oklahoma, will celebrateits tenth anniversaryin 2008. The store stocksover 600 new comicstitles, 5,000differentgraphic novels, action figures, statues, and other comics collectibles. They have over 100,000back issues available. In 2005the storewas nominatedfor the EisnerSpirit of RetailingAward, presented by Comic-ConInternational to comics shops that have effectively contributed to both the community and the industry at large. The storehas sponsoredthe locallibrarytourof ComicRelief, a lectureprogramdeveloped by shop owner MattPrice, who also writes a weekly comics column for Oklahoma City'sOklahoman newspaper.SpeedingBullethosts visitand writers artists,including David Hopkins, Brock ing Rizy, and GeoffJohnsin recentyears. In addition to selling comics, Speeding Bullet operates the Ricochet Cafe, "the world's only superhero deli."RicochetCafe,open every Wednesday,specializes in the hero sandwich. For more information,or to buy theircomics,visit www.speedingbulletcomics.com.
Travis Preston, manager of Speeding
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great places to more
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The Museum of Comic & CartoonArt The Museum of Comic and CartoonArt in New York City does everything a traditionalart museum does, but with comics. Their collectionsand exhibits include every genre of the art medium, including animation, anime, caricature,cartoons,comic books, comic strips, computer-generatedart,editorialcartoons,gag cartoons, graphicnovels, humorousillustration,illustration,political illustration,and sportscartoons. Themuseum intendsto educatethe publicaboutthe medium, which they call the world's most popular art. Beyond an elementaryunderstandingof the form, they promotethe study of comicsand cartoonsas a significant source of dialogue in today's society and as important documentation of historical events. The museum is interested in censorship, self-censorship,and freedom of speech, as reflectedin comic creationand publication. This year, they also began to showcase local cartoonand comic artists. MoCCA offers frequent lectures and workshops featuring cartoonists and comics writers. Most events are free and open to the public. Other recent exhibits have included The Golden Age of Saturday Morning Cartoons, She Draws Comics: 100 Years of America's Women Cartoonists,Will Eisner:A Retrospective,Stan Lee: A Retrospective,and Cartoons against the Axis: World War II War Bonds Cartoons.On June 23-24 the museum will host the sixth annualMoCCAArt Festival, New York's independent comics festival. For a complete listing of currentevents and exhibitions,visit the museum website at www.moccany.org. Compiledby David Shook
March-April2007 179
outposts LiteraryLandmarks & Events
Lambiek
Comics Shop Amsterdam, Netherlands ARMANDO CELAYO
Located on Kerkstraatnear the Liedseplein in central Amsterdam,LambiekComics opened shop on November 8, 1968.It is not only Holland'sfirst comic shop but Europe'sas well. Since opening its doors, Lambiekhas become a venerated source for comics and sequential art. In addition to selling comics, Lambiekalso has a gallery that exhibitsart from such Europeanand North Americanillustratorsas RobertCrumb,Tanino Liberatore, ChrisWare,ErikKriek,Daniel Clowes, and Andre Franquin.Lambiekalso has a comprehensivehistoryof Dutch comics,which can be accessedat http:/ /lambiek. net. Lambiek'swebsite also containsthe LambiekComiclopedia,"anillustratedcompendiumof over 8,000comic artists/' Graphic-novelenthusiastscan purchasebooks, posters,and artworkthroughthe website.
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Some of Tim's Stories By S. E. Hinton
A teenager when she first gained fame, now a seasoned writer,S. E. Hinton takes her trademark themes to a new level in Some of Tim's Stor/es-fourteen original stories depicting adults trapped in lives of missed connections and opportunities. The stories in this collection merge into a larger narrative about two cousins, Terry and Mike, whose lives and families are intertwined but whose paths lead to very different futures: one in prison, the other enduring a guilt-ridden existence working in a bar. $19.95 Cloth • 978-0-8061-3835-0
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HarlanSinger, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family's yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter's with his charm. Soon he and his fourteenyear-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhikingand hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan's long-standing debt. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck's Joads left behind. • 256 pages $24.95 Cloth • 978-0-8061-3823-7
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