Author: Joan Leegant

2010, W.W. Norton & Co.

Filed under: Literary

Wherever You Go is set primarily in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, though it focuses on the lives of three Americans with complicated relationships with Judaism. Yona wants to reconnect with her extremely devout sister; Greenglass, once saved from a life of drugs by religion, is suffering a crisis of faith; and Aaron aims to prove to his father and the rest of the world that he is a worthy son of the Holy Land.

Each of the individual narratives works well enough at first, but they never come together in any sort of a satisfying way. When the strands do begin to intertwine, about two thirds of the way through the book, their interactions seem more convenient than anything else, providing the characters with contrived opportunities to bring their stories to some kind of closure.

For me, the biggest disappointment was the failure to make the most of the setting. Wherever You Go does very little to evoke any kind of a textured world or to convey any sense of what makes Jerusalem and the rest of Israel unique. People eat falafel and cucumber and tomato salad. Most of the Israelis are “from central casting.” It’s very hot. That’s about it.
In fact, many of the book’s descriptions focus on how Jerusalem and the territories are just like anywhere else. The territory settlement where Yona’s sister lives looks “like a planned community in Florida,” a description which is nicely undercut by details like “passengers alighting bulletproof bus number 170,” but for the most part there’s too much of the former and not enough of the latter. The descriptions insist on the setting being just like anywhere else without accounting for why that might be surprising or interesting.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its characters. Greenglass is compelling and likeable. Aaron is compelling and infuriating. Only Yona seems a bit flat, but that also seems to be her problem with herself; she doesn’t like herself much or have much faith in herself, which only makes her appeals to her sister all the more desperate. These characters could be the cast of an interesting novel, but they would need to interact more in a setting that seemed as alive as they are. As it is, they don’t work together nearly well enough to carry the novel.

Recommended reads: For books that abound with vibrant settings, try W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants or E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided. Ms. Leegant has also contributed writing to Chamber Four, and an advertisement for this book has appeared on the site.]

Below, you’ll a find a few more reasons to celebrate some of the

Author: John Paul Stevens

2011, Little, Brown and Co.

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir.

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In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Supreme Court Season again, which means our nation’s top judges are now hearing cases that will affect your life. Holding top billing, we have The State of Florida (and 26 other co-signing states) v. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will test the constitutionality of last year’s controversial healthcare overhaul. But this is only one case of many, and, as Atlantic legal correspondent Garrett Epps points out, the majority of the cases the court will hear this session “have huge practical impact but are devoid of drama.”

You might say the same thing about Five Chiefs. Without an ounce of sensationalism or any inflammatory rhetoric, it offers an insider’s perspective on the deliberative processes of our nation’s foremost deliberating body. Stevens presents a historical survey of the Court under each of its seventeen Chief Justices, focusing on the five who sat during the years he was personally associated with the Court, from his clerkship in 1947 until his resignation in 2010.

It’s an eye-opening look at how the Court actually works, from the influence of the Chief’s management style to the long-standing traditions meant to foster cordiality between people who are paid to argue with each other. Five Chiefs won’t keep you up at night, but it will make you think about how we decide some of the most important questions facing the country today… so maybe it will keep a you up at night.

What impresses me most about Five Chiefs–especially in today’s political climate–is its tone. Whether discussing the Court’s Christmas party or his 90-page dissent in Citizens United (which held that limitations on corporate campaign contributions violated First Amendment protections), Stevens is evenhanded and reasonable, even affable. He has nothing but respect for his colleagues and the institutions and traditions of the Court.

He does, of course, have his own opinions about the Court’s work, and he makes no effort to hide them. He spares a few paragraphs to rehash his thinking on Citizens United and some other notable cases, like Jones v. Clinton or Bush v. Gore, and he makes room to discuss his objections to the originalist interpretation of the Constitution flourishing in the Robert’s Court:

Though we do, and should, rely heavily on the wisdom of individual judges in making countless decisions interpreting and applying rules of law, judges are merely amateur historians. Their interpretations of past events, like their interpretations of legislative history, are often debatable and sometimes simply wrong. Historical analysis is usually relevant and interesting, but it is only one of many guides to sound adjudication.

On the whole, though, Five Chiefs has no obvious agenda. The book isn’t trying to sell readers on Stevens’s judicial philosophy or convince anyone to go back and retry cases where he dissented. His judicial philosophy and his dissents are all included, but they’re secondary to the main task of relating the history of the Court, its leaders, its decisions, and its impact on our republic.

When discussing specific decisions, Stevens doesn’t shy away from a little legal speak. It can take time to parse some of his sentences if you don’t have any training in contract law:

There, the Court held that it was proper to review such cases unless the state court made it clear that there was no federal issue to be decided by including in its opinion an unambiguous statement that its decision rested on an adequate and independent state rule.

But if you can read sentences like that without running off screaming into the night searching for a comma, then there’s nothing here that should turn you off from Stevens’s memoir. For anyone interested in history, politics, government, or the Constitution, I’d recommend putting in what little extra effort some of the subject matter requires. Five Chiefs is well worth it.

Similar reads: for a look at Stevens in someone else’s words, check out John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life by Bill Barnhart.

[A review copy was provided.]

2011, Little, Brown and Company

Filed Under: Literary.

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For fifty pages, I was hooked. Henry Skrimshander is a small-town kid with an almost supernatural sense for playing shortstop. He’s discovered at what might have been the last game of his career and recruited to play for Westish College, a small D III school in Wisconsin. Under the guidance of Mike Schwartz, the Westish teammate who discovered him, Henry rises into the ranks of the nation’s best college players. His future seems bright and assured.

Then we’re introduced to Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College. He’s an interesting guy, but his story doesn’t really have as much to do with Henry as Henry’s roommate, Owen, and there’s Guert’s daughter, Pella, who’s fleeing a failed marriage. Also, Schwartz is having some problems figuring out his life after graduation.

The writing is solid throughout, the characters are convincing and likable enough that I never felt totally dissatisfied, but I often found myself pushing through chapters wondering when all of this was going to get back to Henry, because (surprise) his bright future might not be such a sure thing after all. Unfortunately, Henry’s perspective and his trials on the diamond occupy less space as the novel progresses, and the work as a whole suffers for it.

Now maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I know most books about baseball are not really about baseball. Baseball becomes a vehicle for exploring conflicts societal and historical and philosophical and so on. The Art of Fielding is no different. In the end, it isn’t really about baseball; it’s about the pursuit of perfection and what it does to people.

But the book is at its best when it keeps baseball front and center. All the best scenes happen in either the locker room or on the field. Harbach does an excellent job bringing the the drama of the game to life, building suspense with pacing and expertise, narrating the significance of every pitch like the best play-by-play announcers.

Beyond providing drama, baseball makes a perfect vehicle for exploring the conflict between human fallibility and ideal perfection. It’s a game that requires incredible patience combined with an ability to react with coordinated speed, precision and strength. The smallest misstep or misreading can cause game-changing errors. His growing awareness of this slim margin of error drives Henry like few characters I’ve come across in literature:

Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.

The pursuit of perfection affects the other characters, too, but it never feels as visceral or as immediate or as desperate as it does when seen through Henry’s struggles.

The others are imperfect, they know it, and they’re dealing with it in better or worse ways (except Owen, who seems perfectly imperturbable through most of the novel). They all have their moments, like when Pella earns her very first ever paycheck. She went from being the daughter of a college President to being the nineteen-year-old bride of a handsome, successful architect, and she receives her wages for washing dishes with a mix of exhilaration and shame:

It was embarrassing, how proud of herself she felt. The check proved she’d been alive these weeks, that she’d accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.

Harbach is a talented enough writer that he’s capable of small moments of insight like this one at almost any point. My problem isn’t that the rest of the cast and their problems are uninteresting, just that they’re not as interesting as Henry. They’re not what I thought I would find when I picked up the novel and not what grabbed my attention through those first fifty pages.

There’s a lot to admire here, but the whole is somehow less satisfying than the sum of its parts. If you’re looking for a novel about baseball, be warned: you’re going to have to wade through a lot of other material (including a lot of Melville references). If you’re looking for a contemporary college novel about quarter-life crises and unending adolescence, well, I hope you like baseball.

A few good baseball books: The Natural (Malamud), 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente (Santiago), The Bullpen Gospels (Hayhurst).

2011, Regan Arthur Books

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.

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In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.

While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable.

In “Winter on the Sawtooth,” the narrator shares his wife knowingly, if not happily, with her lover. Their son, Josh, home from his first semester of college for Thanksgiving, isn’t crazy about the idea, and he’s not about to hide it. “Sawtooth” offers my hands-down favorite moment in the collection, and I can’t think of a better example of Nadler’s ability to pry a moment wide open, exposing it to the light of multiple perspectives. It’s this ability more than anything else that allows his characters to appear fully formed and finely flawed amid their sordid stories.

Having declared a truce, father and son, more like brothers or old buddies, sneak out to an abandoned mill to have a beer where the local teens drink. Josh wants to show his father pictures from his first semester, specifically pictures of a girl he’s met, Sarah. The narrator is pleased to be bonding with his son, but he can’t help feeling out of place playing with his son’s laptop in the middle of the woods.

At first, the narrator’s not sure what to make of what he’s looking at, standard college pics of parties and dorm life. But then:

My interest is piqued because of the sheer volume. He has so many photographs of Sarah. Pictures in which she is the focus, in which she is posing, in which she is wearing black tights and patent leather shoes, wearing merino wool and a foolish pillbox hat, wearing Levi’s and canvas shoes, wearing a loose green-and-white baseball-team ringer T-shirt. And there are pictures in which she exists by accident, as an incidental ornament in someone else’s portrait, a blurry figure in the back of a Chinese restaurant. For the few minutes I look, and for days afterward, I’m left with a dark, discomfiting regret that, for all my effort, I can’t seem to lose.

“Here,” Josh says. “Let me show you a picture from he day I met her.”

To have such a thing, I think.

Between the son’s enthusiasm and the father’s regret lies the gulf of a life lived, well in some respects, poorly in others, but past and passing regardless, and certainly not nearly as well documented as the life of his son. That Josh is oblivious to what an older generation might find amazing about something he takes for granted only compounds his father’s amazement. Josh sees what the pictures mean to him now; his father sees what they could mean to him later and envies his son.

Each story in The Book of Life contains a few moments like this one, moments that convey before and after, as if the image were its own negative. Moments like these sometimes stood out even above the stories themselves, so that I find myself more eager to recommend the book as a whole over any particular entry in the table of contents. The length of these stories (the shortest is over 20 pages, the longest is over 40) and the care taken to develop character suggests that Nadler is comfortable in a longer format. According to his website, he’s working on finishing a novel. The Book of Life is very good; I’m betting his novel could be even better.

Similar reads: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Packer), The Feast of Love (Baxter), The View From Stalin’s Head (Hamburger)

[A review copy was provided.]

Pretty much every night before I turn off the light, I read in bed for a while first. It’s a way of focusing myself for sleep, a way of driving off the stray concerns of day by replacing them with a singular voice. Mostly, this works for me, but I’ve learned over the years that reading in bed can be a dangerous proposition. I come from a line of pretty adept insomniacs to begin with, so put a good book in my hands and I’m apt to forget why I was in bed in the first place until it’s already 3 am. If the book isn’t good enough, though, then it just doesn’t do the trick. I lay my head down still full of whatever was hassling my mind during the day.

To that end, I’ve identified a certain kind of book that puts me to sleep in the best possible way. Each of these books comes doled out in small doses of strangeness, short, experimental pieces I can finish in a few minutes while I’m winding down and still take away something worth dreaming about.

Five Books to Take to Bed

5. The Weather of Words, by Mark Strand

This collection of “poetic inventions” presents one of America’s greatest living poets at his most nimble. It includes literary criticism, personal essays, prose poems, and fictional encounters with Jorge Luis Borges and a President who likes to read Chekhov to his cabinet. In whatever form it takes, Strand’s voice is always confident and compelling. He could write for the IRS and probably manage to make the tax code riveting reading. Thankfully, he has a lot more imagination than that.

4. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges

Strolling out of an offhand reference in #5 and straight into the #4 spot, we’ve got Jorge Luis Borges with Labyrinths, a selection of short fiction, essays, and parables that will all stretch your dreaming muscles. These pieces mix content and form, melding science fiction with literary criticism and hiding a murder mystery in a work of philosophy. In the first story of the collection, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges describes the work of the inhabitants of Tlön, a planet invented by a vast conspiracy of intellectuals:

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for truth or even verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.

I don’t think I could describe the effect of reading Labyrinths better than that. These stories will astound you.

3. Forty Stories, by Donald Barthelme

Even more condensed strangeness. Most Borges stories clock in at under fifteen pages; many Barthelme stories rocket by in five or fewer. Each one is a self-contained dream, proceeding by a logic all its own, only to be overthrown by the start of the next piece. “The Educational Experience” takes readers on a quick tour through a museum of all of human trivia; in “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” the narrator and other friends ask Colby to help plan his own hanging; and an entire heard of porcupines tries to enroll in the same university in “Porcupines at the University.” These stories are so strange and so divergent, that the only way I could really tell you what they’re all about would be to go on describing each one individually, so I’ll stop now and let you find out what they’re about for yourself.

2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

This one breaks the mold a little bit. While it is composed in a series of short descriptions of fantastic cities, the sum presents a complexly patterned vision of the empire of Kublai Kahn through the eyes of the great explorer Marco Polo. The book certainly merits some consideration as a whole, but the individual pieces still stand alone like brightly polished artifacts from the ancient world. Take Isidora, for example:

A city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors.

1. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

Without a doubt, my favorite book to read before bed. A novel only in the loosest sense of the word, these 30 stories follow the dreams of a young clerk working in a Swiss patent office during the same year he’s developing a new theory of time. (Sound like someone you’ve heard of before?) Each one is a separate meditation on a universe governed by different temporal laws. Time is a loop, repeated endlessly; time is a liquid, diverted by bends and obstacles in space; time has a perimeter, where it flies past at the speed of light, and a center, where it stops completely.

You might think Time would be too heavy a topic to ponder right before bed, but each of these dreams is only a few pages long, the prose is simple and direct, and the ideas are lighter than air. If this book doesn’t put you in a slower, more contemplative state of mind, then I don’t know what will.

2011, Seedpod Publishing

Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Short-Run.

Here’s a pretty good set up for a short story: Wicker, a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker trying to get to Vegas, scores a ride from Edna, a senile retired school teacher looking for the Pacific Ocean. There’s plenty of comic potential in the contrast of characters, but more than that there’s an opportunity to explore the strange ways that people use one another, taking turns lending direction and meaning to each other’s lives, helping and being helped, exploiting and being exploited.

Scattershot is what happens when you stretch that premise into a rambling novel by adding an irrelevant subplot about Edna’s unhappy son, Andrew, and refusing to see her senility as little more than a punch line. She bumbles along, always certain that she’s doing just what she means to be doing, never doubting, never angry, never afraid, ready to follow Wicker wherever he thinks they should go. The problem is, once he loses his bankroll in Vegas, Wicker is just as aimless as she is.

After that, all the aptly named Scattershot has to offer is the impulsive leading the senile with the sad tagging along.

Don’t get me wrong: Scattershot doesn’t have much to offer before the story gets to Las Vegas either. Wicker has a few misadventures hitchhiking. Edna goes shopping. Andrew commutes in rush hour traffic. Nothing significant happens. It’s just that until that point, at least one of the main characters has a singular drive that gives the novel a sense of semi-coherence: Wicker needs to win some money to buy his few earthly possessions out of hock, including a wooden box holding his mother’s ashes.

It might almost be enough to make Wicker likable, or at least pitiable, if he ever actually seemed to care about his stuff, not to mention his mother’s remains. Instead, Wicker wins the money he needs, then loses it, then arranges to borrow it from Edna, then finally has a chance to make some money of his own, and (spoiler alert) he still never follows through on the plan to buy back his belongings. It turns out his stuff is just important enough to get him to go to Vegas to do some gambling; after that, he makes a few phone calls and forgets the whole thing.

So Edna doesn’t really care where she goes, and Wicker stops caring halfway through. What about Andrew? He seems intent on finding his mother, but that doesn’t stop him from taking time out from the search to ruin his marriage and cruise the strip in a rented Mustang convertible, sad and angry. He also contacts the police and hires a private detective, though nothing ever happens as a result of either, and Andrew’s too distracted with his marital problems to worry about whether or not the authorities are doing their job.

I might have been less frustrated by this book if I didn’t think there was a good idea buried somewhere beneath all the extraneous plot elements. When Edna first picked up Wicker, I felt a glimmer of hope. I saw how different they were and how desperate, and I thought maybe this could work. I still think it could, but as a 10-20 page short story. Right now, Scattershot is a 260 page collection of characters without motivation and incidents without plot. The closest the novel comes to a saving grace is the writing, which isn’t good but inoffensive; it never impresses but rarely grates the nerves either. Until Goodwin and his editors decide to take a chainsaw to the manuscript, and then run it through a dozen more rewrites, you can definitely pass on this one.

.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Jim Shepard

2011, Knopf

Filed Under: Short Stories, Historical, Horror, Literary.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

You Think That’s Bad offers 11 stories inspired by a diverse array of subjects, from flood control and avalanche research to World War II and the Japanese film industry. Each one is thoroughly researched, tightly written, and full of compelling, hopeless characters. As a collection, though, You Think That’s Bad strikes the same emotional chord a little too often to make the whole something greater than its best parts.

One story is about a Black World operative who can’t talk to his wife. One is about a Dutch hydraulics engineer who can’t talk to his wife. There’s a particle physicist who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Japanese special effects designer who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Polish mountaineer who does a better job talking to his wife, but not nearly good enough to save either of them from himself. It’s tragic watching these obsessed men ruin their lives one after the other, but some things start to feel repetitive.

Each of the emotionally damaged specialists at the heart of these stories offers a distinct portrait of the unavailable husband. The Black World operative seems to thrive on keeping secrets for their own sake, while the Dutch hydraulics engineer just can’t seem to stop himself. At one point, he starts a secret bank account using an inheritance that he never tells his wife about. “What am I up to?” he asks the reader. “Your guess is as good as mine.” In different ways, they’re all likeable and infuriating.

But eventually—mostly after it’s too late for them or their spouses—they all come to some version of the same conclusion: that they should have said something; that they should have risked more; that they were hurting themselves as much as everyone else. All fair conclusions to draw from their mistakes, but each iteration decreases the tension from one story to the next. Is it going to work out this time? No. Somehow, it won’t.

On their own, each one of these stories is successful and compelling, mesmerizing in their expertise and deftly balanced with action and insight. “The Netherlands Lives with Water” appears in Best American Short Stories 2010, and “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” is an O’Henry Prize story for 2011, both with good reason. It’s just that once I started seeing a pattern, I found myself more drawn in by stories that broke it, like “Boys Town” and “Classical Scenes of Farewell.”

In “Boys Town,” Martin is back living with his mother after a middling military career and a botched marriage. He’d be more deserving of the reader’s sympathy if he weren’t so eager to ask for it. Almost everything he says contains a plea for someone to take his side. This is how he relates the time he pushed his wife down the stairs:

She was all like “You coulda killed me,” and I was like, “Hey: you shoved me first, and there was a railing, and there was carpet.” She said, “You don’t shove somebody at the top of the stairs,” and I said, “Well what did you do to me?”

You don’t have to read past the italics in the passage above to know what matters most to Martin. He stands out from the other emotionally damaged narrators in You Think That’s Bad by being far more fucked up and unrepentant. He’d be easier to dismiss if he didn’t have a point some of the time, and if he didn’t have a survivalist’s kit and a rifle.

“Classical Scenes of Farewell” is simply one of the most chilling stories I’ve ever read. It’s the story of Gilles de Rais, a homicidal fifteenth-century French noble, as told by one of his closest servants. It beats most horror movies for gore, but it’s the subtle indictments hidden in the language that keep me thinking back on it now. I won’t say anymore except that you should try to read it in one sitting. Preferably during the day.

For me, these two stories were the best in the collection, and not just because they stood apart from some of the other tales of obsession and personal loss. Every story here offers something to recommend it, but these stories took me to the greatest extremes, to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, and brought me back to a room that looked almost like the one I was in when I started reading them. They make me glad I have my own copy of You Think That’s Bad so I can go back to them someday when I get up the nerve.

Similar reads: Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Shepard), Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (Chabon), Jesus’ Son (Johnson).

It would also be nice if the book gave me something to do other than simply reading it for comprehension, a project beyond finishing it and then finishing it again. I’d like a book I that leant itself to memory, something with a little form and rhythm, so I could read it and read it until I knew it by heart.

That’s right. I’m talking about a book of poetry. Specifically, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

I like to make an occasional plug for poetry here on C4 because: (1) I’m told no one reads poetry these days, and (2) I do. More than that, I’d like to make a case for memorizing poetry, a practice that strikes some as old-fashioned and others as outright masochistic. And it’s both, but there’s also a lot more to it than that.

Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” is one of the first poems I ever memorized. It’s also one of the first poems that ever made me really angry. My high school creative writing teacher assigned it. I was supposed to be able to recite it and say something about it the next time we met. So I read it:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In the kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

And then I read it again. It still didn’t make any sense. I blundered through my assignment, memorized the poem and babbled about it in my next class, but I still had no idea what it was about. I was disappointed in myself, frustrated with Stevens, and when the assignment was over, I was ready to forget the whole thing.

The problem was I couldn’t forget it: the coarse alliteration of c’s and k’s in the opening lines; the repetition of long e’s; the surprising details—why “last month’s newspapers”? Once I’d memorized it, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” stuck in my brain like a splinter.

Over time, something started happening. Every once in a while, something in the world around me would brush against the poem in my brain, and I’d feel a pinch of recognition. Shopping for tag-sale furniture, I remembered “the dresser of deal”; watching a Law & Order morgue scene, I remembered “her horny feet protrude… to show how cold she is, and dumb.”

Little by little, the world began explaining the poem to me. An image emerged of a poor woman lying dead in an otherwise mundane scene, neighborhood people standing around, unsure what to do with themselves, looking for something to cover her with, the speaker searching for the profound in all of it.

And who’s the Emperor of Ice-Cream? Or what? I don’t know (and a number of critics I’ve consulted can’t seem to agree either). The poem still holds a lot of mysteries for me, but there it is, in my head, waiting for the world to give it meaning. And in turn, sometimes the poem tells me something about the world around me, when the two match up unexpectedly. They enlarge each other.

Consigned to a deserted island, I’d want the world in my head and the world around me to be as expansive as possible. The more I’ve thought about it the more convinced I am that Stevens’s Collected Poems is the perfect choice: over five hundred pages of some of the 20th century’s most innovative poetry, filled with short lyrics, perfect for perusal between dreamy bouts of staring at the ocean, and longer narratives and poems in suite for periods of greater focus.

More than that, Stevens’s work is marked by all manner of formal games, meter, repetition, irregular and internal rhyme, musical elements that lend themselves to memory. I’m not sure I could ever open my mind enough to fit it all in, but it’s a challenge I’d gladly accept with nothing but time on my hands. I imagine walking laps around the island, mumbling verses to myself, listening for something new in them, looking for something about the island I’d never noticed before, and stopping occasionally to recite “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” to some hermit crabs, trying to get a rise out of them.

Random House, 2011

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

With all the hype about the New Yorker’s 20 under 40, it’s nice to read a debut novel by one of their young authors that lives up to the marketing. The Tiger’s Wife is a captivating combination of history and fable. In her own life and in her grandfather’s stories, the narrator confronts questions of belief in the face of desire for understanding, for relief, and for release. Rather than resolving the world of the novel into one ruled by magic beyond human comprehension, the book’s fairytale elements only accentuate the challenges inherent in faith and doubt.

Natalia is on her way to a medical mission at an orphanage across the border when she receives news of the strange circumstances surrounding her grandfather’s death. Having lied to his wife about going to meet Natalia on her mission, he dies from an illness he’d long concealed, alone in the small town of Zdrevkov near the coast. Figuring out why he chose to slip away from his family to die among strangers drives his granddaughter out to the coast and into his past, into one story she knows and one she will learn.

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories,” Natalia tells us, “the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man.” These two stories and how she comes to know them comprise the bulk of the novel. The story of the tiger’s wife concerns an escaped tiger that takes up residence in the woods around her grandfather’s childhood home. As a boy in love with The Jungle Book, set on befriending the tiger, he finds himself on the wrong side of his small town’s superstitions. What happens will shape his view of love and the pursuit of knowledge for the rest of his life.

The story of the deathless man concerns a series of chance meetings between Natalia’s grandfather and a mysterious patient. She learns the story in episodes throughout her youth, during peaks and lulls in the Balkan Wars. These chapters were the most powerful, conflating Natalia’s upbringing during wartime with her grandfather’s confrontation with the unknown. Each of these sections showcases Obreht’s talent for handling diverse material while giving each its due, tailoring voice and pacing to both realistic and fabulist subjects.

In general, the writing is stellar. Obreht’s prose is effortless and evocative, beautiful without stealing the show from the story. In one of my favorite passages, she describes a group of orphans coloring:

Fra Antun’s kids sat hunched over wooden benches in the middle of the room. There were glasses of pencils and crayons scattered over the tables, and the color rose up in a glaring mess from the pages the kids were writing on, sitting on, sneezing on, folding into paper airplanes or birds.

I love the image of the color rising above the table “in a glaring mess,” which to me conveys all the activity and excesses of children absorbed in their art.

The worst I can say about The Tiger’s Wife is that the present narrative, the story of Natalia’s medical mission and her trip to Zdrevkov, feels thin in places. Sometimes it seems little more than an excuse for revealing the back story, and it grows thinner as the narrative progresses with the tiger’s wife and the deathless man consuming more and more space. But dwelling too much on the present for its own sake misses the point. The Tiger’s Wife isn’t really about Natalia or the present moment so much as finding the past alive in the present, an idea embodied in her grandfather, the novel’s true main character.

Natalia’s grandfather is a compelling curmudgeon, an aging doctor of high regard in the medical community who still carries his old copy of The Jungle Book with him wherever he goes. But we see him as a child, too, and then as a young man finding his way in the world, and finally as an absence around which the rest of the story turns. In the end, The Tiger’s Wife rises and falls on his shoulders, on his faith, his doubt, and his wonder. That the novel works so well is largely a testament to his character and the questions raised by his past, questions about belief in the face of the unknowable and making sense of the unbelievable.

Similar Reads: The Lazarus Project (Aleksandar Hemon), The Life of Pi (Yann Martel), City of Thieves (David Benioff)