The
Editors'
Picks§ § § Witnesses of Time Photographs of Flor Garduño. (Aperture). Stunning black-and-white photographs of indigenous peoples of Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Ecuador. It is "the Indian cosmos." A stone village in the mist, two men, a woman, one of the men carrying a small white casket, strapped to his back. A half-naked Indian woman, surrounded by tropical leaves, reminding us of the paintings of Gauguin. A girl-child with a basket of flowers on her head. Carlos Fuentes, in his introduction, says, "There are many roads in Garduño's photographs: some go to parties, others to graveyards, others, simply to the farmer's fields. But sooner or later all of them cross that threshold of incense where, uncertainly, nature and art blend so that mankind may have a margin of whimsy, freedom, or significance on the face of the gods.
§ § § Looking Through Letterboxes, Caroline Bird. (Carcarnet Press). These are scenes out of Gulliver's Travels, the fascination we all have with scale. The tiny comes to be huge, the grandiose minuscule, and, as in Swift, not only physical size but emotions are turned topsy as well. Adults turn childlike, helpless, parents have to be tucked into bed, children take responsibility. Even the title of the volume implies capture and order, "letterbox" being a place where you send off or receive mail, but too, and, too, the compartments where child's letter blocks are stored. Bird has come up with a contemporary poetic magic which probably owes as much to Edward Thomas as to Lewis Carroll.
§ § § Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin, Roger and Angela Keys, Translators. (New Directions). It is filled with a breathless, sweeping style, that takes the reader into the peaks until Dostoyevsky starts losing it. Obviously, Tsypkin has done his homework; but, more ominously, during the course of writing this, he seems to have become Dostoyevsky. One does that with the novels: who of us haven't felt a kinship, too much of a kinship, with Raskolnikov or Dmitri or Ivan? We would imagine it's a scary process for Tsypkin. It certainly is for the reader.
§ § § Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris. (Simon & Schuster). She finds it melancholy there, calls Trieste "the Capital of Nowhere." Her description of it may make it sound stuffy and bourgeoisie, but her art is turning such around, making it captivating for those very reasons. Often, it's her asides that make her books such a fine study for the reader. She builds kinship with readers with meditations on borders, on the past, on Imperialism, on what she calls the Fourth World. Morris says she is going to write no more books. We don't --- or won't --- believe it.
§ § § The Stories of Paul Bowles, Robert Stone, Editor. (Harper Collins). They are deceptively simple, with somewhat unpleasant characters, usually Americans without much in their brains. The message seems to be that innocents who fiddle around in the Muslim world will be surprised, and that surprise will not be pleasant. We have here some sixty stories by Bowles, the earliest from 1946, the last from 1993. They are arranged (as all such collections should be) by date. We picked it up to give it a hasty scan --- and ended up mesmerized, plowing straight through parts of it, story by story. Few were disappointing; many were harrowing; most were worth it. Bowles' power lies in his economy of words, his ability to set the scene quickly and well, and his charming perversity. Nothing is what it seems. There are puzzles inside puzzles. Hidden in the Muslim world are awful, beautiful eccentricies --- eccentricies that have profound effect on those who don't take the culture or its people seriously. It's wonderful stuff.
§ § § Of Two Minds, Tanya Luhrmann. (Vintage). Dr. Luhrmann is an anthropologist and she uses her background in Of Two Minds to examine the history of American psychiatry, it's purpose and practice up to the coming of managed care. It is rare that one stumbles across a study of this field that is hard to put down. Her insights are powerful. Interns learn early on to see patients as the enemy: they can keep one up all night, and if you blow it, they can sue you (and possibly win). She tells us that therapists, to be effective, must love their patients --- a disinterested but honest love. She speaks, finally, with heartfelt regret of the dismantling, through HMOs, of much that was good and successful in the old-line hospitals and clinics --- ones that utilized "talk" therapy to help those immersed in emotional grief. The reason: the bottom line, and psychopharmacology --- which "fits more easily into these time-limited constraints than psychotherapy does."
§ § § Dark Back of Time, Javier Marías, Esther Allen, Translator. (New Directions). It's a merry chase that Marías takes us on, complete with diversions, false trails, recurring quotes, references to famous people who may not even exist, including obscure authors who also may not exist, having possibly written books that, too, may not exist. The magic is that, in playing with these mirrors and tricks, the reader easily becomes involved not only with the characters, but with the doppelganger of the author himself. Marías is as about a merry a writer as we could want: he dances about the words, in such a droll and comic way, that we find ourselves wondering if he was ever really in Oxford, teaching Spanish literature? Or did he make that up, too? Did he even write the previous novel? Or this one?
§ § § The Egg Man of the Fillmore: Leslie A. Wattles, Otto W. Fedders, PhD. (Ectopic Press) This is about the unknown beat poet, Leslie Wattles who, in his brief life (he died when he was twenty-three) was writing an amalgam of the works of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Japanese haiku. Wattles left behind no great body of work --- indeed, the only poems that evoke any interest were considered so vulgar at the time that they could not be published. Despite the fact that he was one of the first and most original practitioners of haiku in America, on the night of his last arrest, he was refused bail. He defiantly perched all night on the rail of the highest bunk in his cell, and at the crack of dawn, when he began to crow, a drunken prisoner tried to shut him up by pushing him backwards. He fell instantly to his death.
§ § § The Tattered Cloak and Other Stories, Nina Berberova, Translated by Marian Schwartz. (New Directions Classic). Berberova is one of Chekov's spiritual heirs. Like him, she constructs her own rules: what to include, what to leave out, what to emphasize. It is these self-designed, self-imposed rules of fiction that turn a story that might be interesting into a masterpiece. Fat spiders. Hurricanes "from Labrador or the Caribbean." The smell of face powder. Sleeping figures hanging like black sacks. Iodine as a universal panacea. Dark blue dragonflies like you've never seen. They all fit; they all work; we are in the hands of a divine master. "If a story is to seem at all original...its order must somehow be disguised, known only in retrospect, and those laws of necessity governing the function of detail must be masked," says Janet Malcolm, speaking of Chekov --- but she might as well be talking of Berberova.
§ § § The Same Sea, Amos Oz, Translated by Nicholas de Lange. (Harcourt). He's all you could want in a novelist: funny, heartbreaking, outrageous. He can sew together a plot that will knock your socks off. He knows hearts, old and young. He shares the good and the bad of love --- old love, new love --- and loves to tell. Most of all, he, or rather he and his translator, are excellent with words. Much of the book is in verse. It's the real thing, and some of it is gorgeous. There are almost two hundred aperçus --- some running six lines; some a page and a half. Some of the sketches are right out of Browning. A worthy novelist --- one who has to be worth our time --- must construct a universe enough like our own that we know where it can (and should) go, but, at the same time, must create one original enough and strange enough so he can take it (and them) where ever he wants to, even if it means murdering them, getting them robbed, letting them be miserably sad, letting them be so disgustingly brazen.
§ § § Nothing to Fear, FDR in Photographs, Hugh Gregory Gallagher. (Wendamere Press). Gallagher is an expert on Franklin Delano Roosevelt --- not only on his handicap, but, as well, on his psychology; and, as well, the psychology of all the disabled. Gallagher's profound insight was that we pay a high price for the overcoming-all-handicaps myth. FDR showed the world a carefully constructed cheerfulness, but it required an immense amount of work to maintain this dissembling. In Nothing to Fear, Gallagher is lucid, direct, and learned. There are over 150 photographs in the volume, many of which are wonderfully evocative.