STILL READING AGAINST and the MOST IMPORTANT book about the novel to be published

8--Since my mother died on December 21, 1972 the Christmas holidays and the end of the year have been drained of some of the dreary levity that infects much of the population. I remember taken the undecorated Christmas tree and placing it next to the stable set up in front of the Catholic Church in Saugerties, NY.

9--Some books seemed to be of value this year--- giving into the convention of the moment--- and the listing is to the purpose of seeing if in a year or in five years they still remain in my mind, if I am still about because there comes a moment when the life turns and what is to be always expected gains a tiny bit more of focus.

10--TIEPOLO PINK by Robert Calasso (Knopf) was the book that gave me the most intellectual pleasure, a book to go back to again and again as I have done with THE RUINS OF KASCH, KA and THE FORTY-NINE STEPS.

11--Finally, someone --- Calasso--- by looking closely at the work of Tiepolo explained why after him and after the French Revolution and continuing to this day art seems to be not very interesting, beyond being a sort of brain vomit from the solitary imaginations of the artists.

12--BRECHT AT NIGHT by Mati Unt (Dalkey Archive) was the first Estonian novel I have reviewed. By connecting Brecht’s stay in Helsinki on the run from Hitler in 1940/41 with the Soviet destruction of Estonia Unt shapes his visionary novel into a commentary on the obscurity of history while not for a line avoiding the particulars. Brecht waiting for a visa and permission to travel across the Soviet Union to the paradise of Hollywood, all the while cheering on the murderous thugs of Stalin is the highest comedy that crucifies one with one’s own powerlessness

13--VOYAGE BY DUGOUT OR THE PLAY OF THE FILM OF THE WAR by Peter Handke is his final comment on the breakup Yugoslavia in the form of play. I read it in manuscript in a translation by Scott Abbott. That it has not been published is a scandal and shame. Brad Morrow at CONJUNCTIONS chickened out of publishing it even after he had announced it for publication some years ago when he became aware of the intellectual lynch mob lead by the happily dead Susan Sontag who wanted to drum Handke out of literary existence. Happily that has not happened and Handke has a short novel DON JUAN HIS OWN VERSION (FSG) coming out in February, reminding us that he is one of the few world writers who has been mostly available to American readers. One hopes that some genuinely daring publisher will do the play along with reprinting A JOURNEY TO THE RIVERS Justice for Serbia that Viking had the courage to publish in 1997. Not for a moment should anyone think that things have been settled in the Balkans.

14---THE STRUDLHOF STEPS by Heimoto Von DODERER, translated by Vincetn Kling is another book I read in manuscript. If you know Von Doderer’s THE DEMONS, EVERY MAN A MURDERER and THE WTAREFALLS OF SLUNJ you know why this should be available. He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books. This is not to put Musil down in anyway but to suggest that Musil is not the only classic Austrian writer form the earlier part of the 20th Century. Kling has translated more than half of THE STRUDLEHOF STEPS but sadly our literary publishers like skinny novels so how long will we wait?

15---In manuscript form though happily scheduled to appear in the New Year is a short novel by Imre Kertesz, THE UNION JACK… Kertesz is in the pantheon of Hungarian writing that has to include Sandor Mari, Antal Szerb, Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Attila Bartis.

16/16--One should not hold the Nobel Prize against Kertesz in the same way that one should not hold the same prize against Herta Muller. While they might get things really wrong with writers like Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison in this case the Nobel committee did a real service to the book. In a hundred pages Kertesz gets exactly right the dreary deadening reality of socialist Hungary and at the moment he is causing an uproar for mentioning that one really can’t read those Hungarian writers who were published during the communist times without thinking about what they had to do in order to function as writers… who did they sell out, who did they stab in the back, what lies did they tell or tell by omission… and this is the truth for all of Eastern Europe. The communists made mistakes and infrequently allowed a good book to slip through but you probably have more fingers on your hands than you would need to enumerate these writers or books.

17/18--The one American book… but you know I dislike mentioning the nationality of a writer… that I continue to read is IMPERIAL by William K. Vollmann (Viking). I would even say it is THE American book and will be read or at least I read it along with Henry James’s THE AMERICAN SCENE and two books about the west of Ireland by Tim Robinson STONES OF ARAN and CONNEMARA. I am taking IMPERIAL with me in January when I drive about Imperial, the Salton Sea on my way to Douglas and Tombstone where once again I will take up CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela which is the best book ever written about the American West.

19—Coming: THE THREE FATES by Linda Le. (New Directions) I reviewed an earlier novel of hers, SCANDAL… part of the Vietnamese diaspora in France... while her books are rooted in personal experience they have a visionary quality that leaves her on the edge of a terrifying possible descent and it is only her continued ability to find words that keeps her among the living.

19---Coming: PURGE by Sofia Oksanen. (Grove) Estonian Finnish writer who writes of the terrible consequences of the Soviet occupation of Estonia and the attemps to live with the consequences. I wish they had started with STALIN’S COWS and can only hope that will appear eventually.

19---Coming: NOT ART by Peter Esterhazy (Ecco) Stupidly Ecco skipped the essential sequel to CELESTIAL HARMONIES that called into question everything that Esterhazy had so confidently written about his father. This book continues the story of his mother from HELPING VERBS OF THE HEART, an earlier book which published in a very poor translation.

19---Coming: THE MUSEUM OF ETERNA’S NOVEL by Macedonio Fernandez (Open Letter). Do not be put off by the rather common introductions but find the wonderful essay by Jorge Luis Borges who acknowledges that Fernandez taught him everything , well in a fashion… Finally a genuine step beyond TRISTRAM SHANDY.

20—RIGHT NOW: ROBERT BRESSON A Passion for Film by Tony Pipolo (Oxford) Pipolo writes without the usual film critical theory rubbish but happily he guides the viewer into the greatest ( why not) movie director… Don’t worry I know: John Ford, Dumont, Bela Tarr… but last night I Saw The Trial of Joan of Arc… the opening is so intimidating, so devastating as an image of angry power on the march… and we know it will be met by Joan in all her complexity about to be reduced to ashes except

20—RIGHT NOW. I have been reading the four novels by Juan Jose Saer that are available in English. THE WITNESS, THE INVESTIGATION, NOBODY NOTHING NEVER, THE EVENT. I came to Saer by way of a visit with Alain Robbe-Grillet who on the floor had a book by Saer opened and underlined. I wish I could remember which one it was but Robbe-Grillet mentioned that Saer had been much influenced by his work and now upon reading him I can well see that and if only more writers were so wonderfully influenced. Saer is a lefty writer whose literary work exist first as literature--- well aware of the need for a genuine modern approach since the realist novel is a dead relic of a miserable moment in literary history--- and whose radical politics discreetly underlines the force of his sentences and forms and the reader is convinced of the terror that gripped parts of South America. In contrast I do not for moment believe a word Eduard Galeano writes because he is so crude in form and thought: just another leftist hatchet man.

And I would pay a quick homage to the single greatest novel to come out of South America I THE SUPREME by Augusto Roa Bastos, another lefty but with this novel he is in my personal pantheon with ULYSSES, JOURNEY TO THE END OF NIGHT, EUMESWIL and…

20--- As it is so demanding, … I have only tried again and again to read BLOOD FROM THE SKY by Piotr Rawicz as I have been forced to think closely about the murder of the Jews of Europe and this came about by reading MURDER WITHOUT HATRED Estonians and the Holocaust by Anton Weiss Wendt.

I had known nothing about how Estonians in order to please their German friends went about killing all the Jews and gypsies who remained in Estonia in 1941. The now knowing about the cool murdering, the distributing of the murdered children’s clothing and toys to Estonian children, happening even in the smallest towns, towns we had gone through this summer where there is no memory of these terrible events has changed my wife whose first language is Estonian and as a result it becomes hard to think about going back to Estonia until we have thought more about these events…

21 I am writing the last pages of NOTHING DOING which began with three men traveling in a painting by Poussin and has move about and through Douglas and Ajo, Arizona, been to Hermosa Beach, to Sofia, to Paris, to Patchogue… three men--- soldier priest poet--- described by Baudelaire, transformed by paralysis all looking for where they are to be buried. Of course it is a comedy trying to avoid in Denis Donoghue’s phrase, the penury of fact.

The best news only for those who read the whole post: IN APRIL Continuum will publish Steve Moore's THE NOVEL AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY. Moore begins with the first novels written in 1190-1800 BC in Egypt and so unlike all the other books about the novel I have ever read he has genuinely tried to read every major novel published in ALL the world's languages, north, south, west and east. This is the first part and he stops in 16/17 century in China. He will continue with the so-called modern. But just from this work, you will never ever again think that Flaubert, Austen, Dickens, Eliot etc etc are the be all and all... never ever again will you think that 300 pages is a long novel... Moore will create a revolution in how we think about the novel or at least that is my hope...

PAUL MORAND, ANTAL SZERB, JULIAN GREEN: Essential Books from PUSHKIN PRESS

C

On my shelves by PAUL MORAND:

Black Magic
Earth Girdled
Green Shoots (Preface by Marcel Proust)
Fancy Goods and Open All Night (translated by Ezra Pound)
Open All Night (translated by HBV)
Closed All Night
The Living Buddha (two different translations)
1900 A.D.
World Champions
Nothing but the Earth
Lewis and Irene
Europe at Love
East India and Company
Orient Air Express
Indian Air
The Captive Princess
Montociel
New York
Le Voyage (a photocopy)

All of these books are out of print though the New Directions’ edition of Ezra Pound’s translation of Fancy Goods/ Open All Night is available.

This IS NOT to go on about out of print books.

D

New York though published in 1930 is still a good guide book for New York, much in the same way that The American Scene by Henry James is a good introduction to the United States if read with Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

E

Pushkin Press based in London publishes what are the prettiest and most elegant books in the English language world. Readers already well know this,one hopes, and have read for instance the four novels by Antal Szerb that they have brought over into English and by so doing restored or placed them and him into the pantheon of world literature: JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND, THE QUEEN’S NECKLACE, and OLIVER VII. Like Sandor Marai, Szerb came to an awful end but their books and those of certain contemporary Hungarian writers would suggest that Hungarian is one of the great world literary languages…

From JOURNEY BY MIDNIGHT: “He was a really devout Catholic, as Jewish converts often are. Their centuries of tradition haven’t been eroded the way they have for us… He cut out of his life everything that was not purely Catholic. He guarded his soul’s salvation with a revolver.”

F

But it is Paul Morand at the moment that Pushkin Press is revealing anew to the English speaking (reading?) world .

They started with VENICES. Note the plural. A book of fragments memories both from reading and from life: An overcast October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them …

Then on to THE ALLURE OF CHANEL, the notes to a biography never written, from the time when he was seeing her after World War Two, after that moment when they had both chosen the wrong side, as history revealed only later…
Chanel is speaking: I have dressed the world and today it goes about naked.
All of that delights me. All of that satisfies this deep taste for destruction and evolution that is within me. Life is recognizable through its inconsistencies

G

(Both books were translated by Euan Cameron who also translated for Pushkin Press Julian Green’s THE OTHER SLEEP.

Green is another writer who seems so essential and one finds every once in the while another who dips, as do I, into his Diary and finds no matter what passage is read that as a result the world seems a little larger and not really as... it surely is…)

H

And now HECATE AND HER DOGS:

“What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“And you?”
“Nothing.”
This was the distilled essence of all our conversations, the words most frequently used by lovers everywhere, emblem of the total vacuum in which they coexist.

BEST READ WRITER IN THE WORLD: ROBERTO CALASSO

(a ghost of these words appears in the 25 October 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Section)

The Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo is hardly a household name in the United States. A few of his paintings, drawings and etchings are scattered in major museums in the country but to see his work in its fullness one has to have gone to Venice, Wurzburg, Germany and Madrid to view the magnificent ceiling paintings and frescos crowded with either religious or classical figures captured with a dazzling sense of color that easily rival Michelangelo in their grandeur and complexity. His name became an adjective for a fabric shade of pink. He is included in all the standard histories of art and his name is always linked to Veronese and others in that cast of prolific painters who can easily be confused by a visitor to Venice. Possibly, this necessary introductory paragraph runs the risk of providing an excuse for both skipping what is to follow and the book that occasioned the review. However, to miss rushing out to get the latest book by Roberto Calasso would be a terrible intellectual disaster and it is the next best thing to actually going to Europe to see Tiepolo’s work for yourself.

Calasso is the most interesting, demanding, inquisitively intoxicating critic writing anywhere in the world today. This claim is based upon his books, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, The Ruins of Kasch, Ka, The Forty-Nine Steps, Literature and the Gods , K and his newest one devoted to describing the life and work of a painter who seems so obscure as to be invisible even though his work has been seen by millions. The word critic does little justice to a writer like Calasso whose every sentence is rooted in a profound understanding and discerning appreciation of all the major literatures of the world both ancient and modern and these sentences always entice their readers to more thought, more reading, to reflection, to wonder.

Early on he tosses down the gauntlet, the intellectual dare, “Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe. And like all true happiness, it was full of dark sides destined not to fade away, but to get the upper hand.” Remembering Tiepolo’s dates (1696-1770) and what comes after which is really the time we still live in, “Painting steadily became a monologizing activity, a calm delirium that started and stopped every day, with the hours of daylight behind the windows of a studio. Artists remained brimming with moods, whims, caprices, and idiosyncrasies. And in the end even they risked disappearing.”

Providing a complete survey of Tiepolo’s work from the prolific beginnings in Venice and then his productive travels across Europe, Calasso is not for a moment deterred by the fact that there is not a single bit of self commentary and never resorting to any sort of crude historic guess work he is elegant in his generalizing and astonishing in the particularities as when commenting upon a painting depicting Antony and Cleopatra at the moment when she is about to dissolve her priceless earring in a glass of vinegar, “Anthony represents the power that invades the world but he does not possess the two pearls. Only one of which is sufficient to vanquish him. What happens to the other? It was sawn in two--- and the two halves were attached to the ears of the statue of Venus in the Pantheon. There is decidedly something paltry about that Western Power, obliged to adorn one of its goddesses with two half pearls that the Oriental queen was prepared to swallow in a sip of vinegar.”

Aptly and beautifully illustrated it should be mentioned, Calasso centers his book about an attempt at explicating--- though never committing the vulgar sin of doing a definitive version--- of the Caprricci and the Scherzi, two series of etchings packed with a cast of mysterious characters, who much like a company of a great Hollywood studio in the old days: magicians, Magi and other visitors from the East, beautiful young men and women, and a plethora of other creatures in particular snakes and owls who will and have appeared in many disparate roles in the great paintings that enclose this mysterious center of mystifying events, which have defied understanding until this moment. Calasso’s explication with the constant crossing and re-crossing of these characters and creatures is written in a style that evokes the reading of a deeply compelling novel and that skill can be seen in his teasing out of the proliferation of snakes in the etchings and their constant re-appearance in the paintings. Of course he starts from the Garden of Eden on to the magical transformation of a staff into a snake during the Egyptian captivity, the plague of snakes in the desert and then, “Moses’s gesture when he brandished a bronze serpent and told the murmuring Jews to look at it, was a gesture that marked the discovery that evil can be cured by its image… It was the discovery of the image, of its healing power. It is one of the supreme Jewish paradoxes that this discovery was made by he who would be remembered and celebrated as the enemy of images…”

However, Calasso pushes his insight into an intriguing engaging way into Tiepolo’s work, “Salvation through looking which the Fathers of the Church would ignore because the only thing that truly concerned them about the story of the brazen serpent was the prefiguration of the Cross was recognized by a painter before any theologian… hence the serpents: horror, fascination perhaps even revelation.. A tangle that no one can loosen unless he joins those Orientals, youths and Satyresses under a dazzling noonday sun as in the desert (in the Capricci and Scherzi).”

Finally Calasso takes leave of his readers while describing one of Tiepolo’s last paintings, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, “Mary, Joseph, the child and the donkey can barely be seen in a corner. They are anonymous extras, absorbed in the landscape. The vision is still to come. There is an intact stasis—and the wonderful silence of the world.” Where the attentive reader has always been remembering Calasso’s quoting the great French reactionary Joseph De Maistre, “I have read millions of witticisms about the ignorance of the ancients who saw spirits everywhere: it seems to me that we who see them nowhere are much more foolish.”

JAMES WOOD and HAROLD BRODKEY

---To write of Harold Brodkey is to speak of the dead and I fear of the really dead in the sense that he is now a forgotten writer... and so quickly he is gone into both the real and the metaphorical earth.

---I was thinking this as I was reading James Wood on the collected so-called stories of Lydia Davis. I can't be bothered to even describe his writing or Davis. It is all a question of sheer human perversity: how can this very good translator be wasting her time writing so-called stories that will not survive a moment beyond her death when she could have been finishing her translations of Michel Leiris, for instance?

---But I have before me a photo-copy of the five tabloid pages that James Wood devoted to a review and interview with Harold Brodkey in The Guardian (London, July 20-21, 1991.

---I must assume anyone reading this blog knows the work of Brodkey and keeps in a treasured place at least two of his books: STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE and THE RUNAWAY SOUL. Right there near THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE BY Hannah Green and PARADISO by Jose Lezama Lima

---The interview and then the review is startling because the name of Brodkey never passes through Wood's typewriter since he moved to the US and began his slog through the pages of The New Republic, The New Yorker and into the damp boring rooms of Harvard. To have an enthusiasim for a writer like Brodkey would be the kiss of the death as it seems the consensus is sadly that we (they) were all mistaken abouthim and his writing; it is just a bad memory and a man like Wood can make no mistakes, not one. He well knows that if there is that one mistake as happened to Denis Donoghue when he panned rightly the dread Frank McCourt's first novel for the New York Times, he will not be asked back to write for whichever organ he is caressing at the moment.

---In the course of the Guardian article: "I had managed to get hold of the typescript of The Runaway Soul, had read its 1,300 pages and was over-whelmed with it.... unlike anything in contemporary fiction. It is nakedly original."

or

"Brodkey's prose is unlike any other writer's in the English language. It is intensely personal(most of his writing is about his childhood) and shockingly obsessive. Its originality, which is oppressive in its density..."

"a man whose writing is courageous and original and possibly great...

"Brodkey's novel certainly has the reek of glory. But greatness is like the Seraph. How can we know it? How can we know yet if Brodkey's novel is great? It has the ambition of greatness, the daring. But its oddity and its singularity bewilder the reader. It needs the sifting of posterity...

---Well, I guess Wood has done that.

---Have you noticed that when a writer gets to a certain place, in particular into the places such as where Wood has taken up residence something is always lost and that something is evident in James Wood on Lydia Davis in The New Yorker. Only John Updike ever escaped this well-lit prison and then only rarely as for instance when he would take up the books of Robert Pinget.

WHY DOESN'T THE UNITED STATES HAVE A GREAT WRITER at the present moment?

Nobel Prize season and again we have been spared the sad spectacle of a Joyce Carol Oates or a Philip Roth or a Don DeLillo getting the Nobel Prize. Of course some have argued that they should have given a second Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison for after all wouldn't it be just since they were not able to give a second Nobel to that other great American laureate Pearl Buck.

But surely anyone who reads is aware that at this moment in the United States there is not a great writer living in our midst.

Now I know it is possible and maybe even likely that there is one because I remember Richard M. Elman once saying back in 1971, that there is no such thing as an unknown great writer in the United States... for a moment he was filled up with a typical New York arrogance but...

Still as far as I can tell and I would hopeam wrong.. there is not a great writer living in the United States.

The why is beyond me.

The fact is there and we don't have to argue really about what makes up that word great.

In spite of critical and popular disinterest I have been aware within my lifetime of living in a country where a few great writers lived: Faulkner, Hemingway, William Bronk, Edward Dahlberg, Julian Green (though he lived in France he always said he was American born not made), Glenway Wescott, Hannah Green, Lorine Niedecker, Ronald Johnson, maybe George Garrett...

I can make myself clearer if I mentioned that if I think of Spain: Julian Rios, if I think of Hungary : Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy, Imre Kertesz, if I think of Estonia: Tonu Onnepalu, if I think of Romania: Herta Muller, if I think of Serbia" Milorad Pavic, if I think of the Irish language: Nuala NiDhomhnaill, if I think of China: Ha Jian, Italy: Roberto Calasso...

But in the United States only William T. Vollmann and Madison Smartt Bell come to mind as possible candidates... and I hope to live long enough to see them come into... which might seem strange given their vast accomplishments. However, Bell clouded, at least for me, his purpose with more than a thousand pages devoted to Toussant L'Ouverture and Haiti flying in the face of the definitive imaginative THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD by Alejo Carpentier which in 100 pages...

And as to Vollmann, there is a soft core of sentimental leftism that sometimes enervates his thinking but it is kept in check by his senses that transcribe a constant refutation of that delusional germ

Again, the Unites States does not have a great writer living within its borders though every week another is announced or better promoted... I cant bring myself to type the current names...

After-thoughts.

I wanted to include Cormac McCarthy because of Suttree and Blood Meridian but until there is a third book to equal them... I hold back... The Road is memorable as the language would have it and one will have to forget the movie that is coming soon or has left already though it is a finger exercise

I wanted to include James McCourt but his possible great trilogy begun in Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey seems to have been de-railed in favor of a popular book about the New York Irish... but his Time Remaining makes me reconsider.. but no,...

HOMAGE TO HERTA MUELLER from 1996

I published the following review of THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS in The Washington Times on November 17, 1996. It was one of very few reviews that book received. It was not quoted on the paperback version. When I called The Washington Times today (October 8, 2009) they can not access it as back issued are not available. One of course feels compassion for Herta Muller for by winning the Nobel Prize...

Of course, in the United States what passes for a novel has sunk even lower...


Finally, a book that describes in precisely hewn detail what it was like to live in Romania under communism. By paying careful attention to the slightest nuances of life in Romania the book also gives an accurate description of what it was like to be alive anywhere in Eastern Europe during the years of communism.

Author Herta Muller was born in 1953 into the large German-speaking minority in Romania, and like the narrator of her new novel, she was driven to leave Romania in 1987. In 1989, her short episodic novel The Passport" was published here in translation. But it only hints at the startling originality of "The Land of the Green Plums," which is seamlessly translated by poet Michael Hofmann. It faithfully follows the original German edition in terms of typography and spacing, which emphasize the poetic nature of the text and make it easier to follow the subtle shifts of mood and voice.

By tracing out the varied fates of five young persons who meet at a provincial college--- Lola, Edgar, Kurt, Georg and the narrator--- Miss Muller has constructed a devastating portrait of how ordinary lives were twisted and devoured by the fear that was purposefully created by the rulers of Eastern Europe, in this case, Nicolae Ceausescu.

The books of Czeslaw Milosz, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstam have prepared us for the the awfulness of that life, which distorted every aspect of the human personality. If I were to tell you of being arrested in Bulgaria in 1967 for writing on a table-cloth, "No communists. No capitalists. Only free people. All you need is love." you might think I was putting you on. (I am not) Similarly, one's first reaction is disbelief when Miss Muller describes what happens after Lola, a fellow student and friend of the narrator, hangs herself.

"Five girls stood by the entrance-way of the dormitory. Inside the glass display case was Lola's picture, the same as the one in her Party book. Under the picture was a piece of paper. Somoeone read out loud: This student has committed suicide. We abhor her crime and we despise her for it. She has brought disgrace upon the whole country... At four o'Clock in the afternoon, in the great hall, two days after she hanged herself, Lola was expelled from the party and exmatriculated from the university. Hundreds of people were there. Someone stood at the lectern and said, She deceived us all, she doesn't deserve to be a student in our country or a member of out party. Everybody applauded."

The horror is in the pronouns: us, we, our.

Miss Muller has construced a novel that violates every rule of what was expected of a novelist in communist Romania. It also might be said that the book goes against neary every expectation of what passes for a novel today in America. It eschews plot. What is happening line by line, page by page, outweighs any interest in what is going to happen next. We live within the head and central nervous system of the narrator. But it is not a claustrophobic place to be: The voice is alive to the world, defiantly alive in a determination to fail in the construction of positive, uplifting characters.

Miss Muller relies upon the sensibility and intelligence of her readers to understand that they are being asked to enter into the consciousness of the narrator, who makes her way through a life that offers nothing but suicide, exile and betrayal. Her narrator also undersands that, having survived that world and made it to Germany, one still has been irrevocably mutilated in spirit by this world where, "you could feel the dictator and his guards hovering over all the secret escape plans, you could feel them lurking and doling out fear."

The title of the book says much, but it needs a little explanation: "Plumsucker was a term of abuse. Upstarts, opportunists, sycophants and people who stepped over the dead bodies without remorse were caled that. The dictator was called a plumsucker, too."

In a country run by such people, it got you labeled as a dangerous dissident if you were even mildly lacking in enthusiasim for the communist future and wished to maintain some sense of ordinary decency and privacy. Once singled out, the characters in the novel can never escape the attentions of the police and their accomplices.

Miss Muller ranges across the whole of Romanian society, from the peasants ground down by hunger and casual brutalization to the industrial workers who work in dnagerous factories making useless articles no one wants. Her depiction of the degraded workewrs in a slaughterhouse is unequaled anywhere in the literature from Eastern Europe. The men drink the blood of the slaughtered animals and trade stolen raw animal parts for casual and violently demeaning sex while thinking they are getting back at the regime by so doing.

"The men staggered and yelled at one another before snashing each other over the head with empty bottles. They bled. If a tooth fell to the ground, they would laugh as if someone had lost a button. Someone would bend over, pick up the tooth and toss it into his glass. Because it brought good luck, the tooth was pased from glass to glass. Everyone wanted it"

The narrator, like the other voices she allows to enter her mind, learns that you cant trust anyone, whch is probably the most awful result of communism.

She becoems friends with Tereza whose father is a well-connected sculptor. When the narrator is finally living in Germany, Tereza comes to visit, but she comes as an agent of the police, to spy, since one of the narrator's friends has either jumped or been pushed from a window to his death. Tereza is meant to be sympathetic: She has cancer, no luck in love, and yet she betrays the narrator, who alone has been nice to her.

And of the man who has driven two of the narrator's friends to suicide and another into a miserable exile, representing thousands, probably, the author laments that there has been no retribution, no closure, no justice.

This is the horrifying and unblinking truth of this novel and why it has to live on. Miss Muller has triumphed in her honesty, and "The Land of the Green Plums" is her testimony.

PS: and to date, all those communists and fellow travelers for the most part got away with it and in many cases turned themselves into the so-called mafia--- but that is another tale waiting to be told as the former communists and their fellow travelers go about convincing the world that they are the only people who really suffered under the communism

DID SCHEHERAZADE'S VAGINA LUBRICATE AT THE...

The other night Denis Donoghue was over for dinner and the unspoken or the unsaid was talked about. When he was growing up in Northern Ireland religion and politics for obvious reasons were not talked about. Many think that race is another more American thing not spoken about but he suggested that taste was the most unspoken thing today. We are not prepared to challenge another's taste in anything. I discovered something else inside the world of the unsaid. The copy desk at the Los Angeles Times made me aware that one is not allowed in that paper to write this sentence: Did Scheherazade's vagina lubricate at the approach of the caliph?


(from JACKET COPY the book blog at the LOS ANGELES TIMES)

(please insert my sentence at the appropriate moment)

Thomas McGonigle, an occasional contributor to the book review, caught Nélida Piñon in New York City.

Does Scheherazade get aroused at the thought of having sex with the Caliph?

That was the unexpected question Brazilian writer Nélida Piñon recently explored with preeminent translator Gregory Rabassa before an audience in New York on the occasion of her controversial new novel “Voices of the Desert.” The novel, which is an erotic retelling of “One Thousand and One Nights,” led Piñon and Rabassa to a question no one in the assembly hall of the Americas Society on Park Avenue could have expected. (The original question, I assure you, was even saltier.)

At 73, Piñon seems the elegant epitome of anyone’s favorite aunt — but appearances are deceptive. She was the first female president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (elected in 1996). A protégé of Clarice Lispector and her last literary confidant, Piñon said she did not talk to Lispector’s recent biographer, Benjamin Moser, because a confidant should not give up her confidences.

Piñon is the author of numerous novels, now published in all the major languages. English translations of her work include “The Republic of Dreams” and “Caetana’s Sweet Song.” In discussing “Voice of the Desert,” she denies that the novel is a radical critique of the situation of a woman in Muslim society -- rather, Piñon is a novelist rooted in the actuality of a woman’s flesh. This is why the answer she gave, to the question mentioned above, was powerful in its simplicity. How could Scheherazade be aroused?

“A woman does not make love under compulsion to a tyrant,” she explained.

Later, after the talk, I wanted to see how Piñon’s views may have changed over the years. I reminded her that Scheherazade had surfaced in another interview she’d had — 17 years ago — with me about writing and the sources of one’s inspiration. She had been talking about what it was like to care for her mother when she was gravely ill — and how that experience led to another memory of her being sick as a child and being cared for by her mother:

My mother would follow me about the house, in the garden always presenting me with food, trying to get me to eat. For some reason I was refusing to eat. In order to seduce me she started to tell me a story. For each spoon of food I accepted, she was obliged to advance the story. As soon as I had a portion of words that corresponded with the spoonful of food, I immediately refused to open my mouth unless she would deliver more words. It was a verbal game: My mother at that time was a Scheherazade eager to protect my life instead of stealing it. She was my first living writer.

“Yes,” she said, after the talk, “That was true: But it was really my mother’s loving words that opened my mouth.”

Also during that earlier conversation, years ago, Piñon had mentioned how difficult it was to be a writer in a country like Brazil where half the population did not own a pair of shoes. Today, she says the situation is even worse -- not only in Brazil, but the world at large.
“Today our whole attitude toward money has changed," she said. "From the newspapers it would seem that, in America, even a mediocre actor expects to get a million dollars for a movie, and a ticket for 'Tosca' in New York can cost more than $1,200! It is terrible to be a young person in such an atmosphere.”