Prose Microreviews
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The
Voice Imitator
Thomas Bernhard
Translated by Kenneth J. Northcott
University of Chicago Press, $17.95
The Voice Imitator, a collection of 104 one-page short stories, proffers
its ironies with a blank, journalistic tone. A great comic actor throws himself
off a cliff; a man is committed to an insane asylum for suggesting that Goethe's
last words were "no more" rather than "more light"; monkeys in a city zoo
offer food to the zoo's visitors. Some of the stories seem more indicative
than narrative, like facts in a case Bernhard builds for a skeptical world
view. The stories repeatedly suggest that the world does not reward its inhabitants
for their survival; instead, society punishes them or they punish themselves.
And the phrase "in the nature of things," which appears and reappears as a
link between the odd events described and a more ordinary status quo beyond
the book's reach, signifies less with each repetition. Sometimes the tales
Bernhard tells are unsettling reminders of the individual's insecure anchor-hold
in the universe; other stories blend dry wit with absurdity. This volume,
palatable and brief, should serve as a feasible introduction to the rest of
Bernhard's work.
-- Max Winter
The Outermost Dream: Essays and Reviews
William Maxwell
Graywolf Press, $12.95 (paper)
In his book reviews, William Maxwell chooses not to write about fiction.
The eminent novelist, story writer, and long-time fiction editor at The
New Yorker prefers to read about real life: "what people said and did
and wrote," biographies, journals, volumes of correspondence. In this reissued
collection of appreciations, part of Graywolf's "Rediscovery" series, he rarely
strikes a disgruntled note (the one exception is a review of a patently shoddy
biography of Frank O'Connor, whom Maxwell knew intimately). His discussions
of Colette, Giacometti, Welty, Laurie Lee, Forster, Woolf, and Sylvia Townsend
Warner sparkle with a cherishing affection. So generous is he to his subjects
that whole pages of his book are devoted to quotations. "One does not admire
things enough," he quotes from one of Warner's characters, "and worst of all
one allows whole days to slip by without one pausing to see an object . .
. exactly as it is." Maxwell is an admirer, not a critic, and his gracious
sensibility is a gift.
--Randall Curb
The Story I Tell Myself
Hazel Barnes
University of Chicago Press, $21
Hazel Barnes is the translator of Sartre's Being and Nothingness.
Opening her autobiography, one might expect an account of French intellectual
life of a certain vintage, or perhaps a complicated reckoning of a lifetime's
critical choices. It's an shock, then, to discover instead the altogether
unexotic story of the largely retiring life of an academic woman in mid-20th-century
America. Barnes came from a strict Methodist family, but rejected religion
and trained as a classicist. Her encounter with Sartre's work constituted
a conversion, and in the unabashed manner of devotes she is still given to
contemplating her own experiences in the light of the master's (comparing,
for example, his nervous symptoms with hers), even as she reserves judgment
about some of his more engag enthusiasms. Barnes approaches existentialism
as an insightful, encouraging teaching not all that far removed from her family's
Methodism: "By their deeds shall ye know them." She talks openly but without
resentment about the difficulties she has confronted as a female professional,
and touches fondly upon her life with a female companion. Her tone is reserved
yet reflective, curiously unselfconscious, while her story as a whole is of
a life lived not just with thought and care, but with devotion--a life of
service, admirable, often enviable, and, from a contemporary vantage, very
strange.
--Edwin Frank
The
Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late Victorian Society
Michael S. Foldy
Yale University Press, $30
One hundred years after his death, Oscar Wilde reigns on stage and screen.
The bizarre success of Gross Indecency--a clunky, unimaginative theatrical
reenactment of Wilde's "sodomy trials," portraying the complicated Wilde as
a sort of wounded Felix Unger--and the forthcoming movie starring Stephen
Fry attest to a sudden interest in Wilde as character. And character he was:
leader of the fin-de-siècle Aestheticist movement, flamboyant
dresser, wonderfully witty talker, Wilde--a clever but never "great" playwright/novelist/poet/essayist--was
essentially famous for being famous, and for being homosexual in an age during
which Britain was deciding what sexual deviance meant and whether to punish
it. In The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality And Late Victorian
Society historian Michael S. Foldy advances a theory: Wilde, who was imprisoned
for "indecent acts" with men, served as whipping-boy for larger societal anxieties
over "moral health"--and as scapegoat for the crimes of Lord Rosebery, the
homosexual Prime Minister. While several books already interpret Wilde's trial
as a social mirror, Foldy manages to unearth interesting aspects of the case,
and the Rosebery angle is intriguing. Wilde fans would do well to skip the
play and check out the trial transcripts and Foldy's analysis instead.
--Shelley Salamensky
Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews
Eva Hoffman
Houghton Mifflin, $25
Before the Holocaust, Poland held the largest Jewish population in the world.
Inspired by a PBS Frontline documentary on Bransk, a Polish-Jewish
shtetl, former New York Times Book Review editor Eva Hoffman
traces the history and lifeways of Ashkenazi jewry; there's more to it than
Fiddler on the Roof. Readers might be surprised to learn, for instance,
that in the time of the Khazars (600-900 CE), the area to the northeast of
Poland "was a multiethnic state in which . . . much of the ruling elite was
Jewish, or had converted to Judaism to resist Muslim dominance." Jews continued
to migrate to the region even after this apparent golden age due to semi-hospitable
political conditions. Hoffman argues that Jewish-Polish relations were less
hostile at times than is commonly believed. Whether her position is sound
or, as some critics claim, overly rosy, Shtetl's greatest offerings
are its wealth of historical information and its solid, unsentimentalized
portrait of Jewish village life. At least as a "roots" trip, Shtetl
proves fascinating reading. You don't have to be Jewish but . . . you know
the rest.
--Shelley Salamensky
Dra---
Stacey Levine
Sun & Moon Press, $11.95
The title character of Levine's first novel wanders searchingly through
the labrynthine hallways of an anonymous government building, fixated on finding
the Employment Office and a job. The florescent lights, iron-frame desks,
and hunched working bodies of a nightmare bureaucracy compose Levine' postapocalyptic
landscape, where the bewildered Dra--- must fend for herself. Ever-ripe for
reprogramming, she is a blank slate--any image she sees "slips from her mind
because she cannot hold it there"--and so is Dra--- itself. Its narrative
is so self-consciously allegorical, so strictly symbolist, that a restless
reader can conjure any foundation for the allegory. A critique of a society
so technologically advanced as to obliterate the concept of individual choice?
An attack on heterosexist culture? (Levine shoots off lines like "the world
tended to flower and open for those who made firm, intelligent choices in
life" with a wink and a nudge.) The effect is less universalizing than vague,
and as the bureacratic vise ever tightens its grip around Dra---, Levine retreads
Kafka rather than reimagining him. But bright, funny moments abound: when
the "Lecturer"--a self-help drill sergeant sent to fire up the job-seekers--barks
that "it's high time we talked about the feelings," Dra--- clutches her throat
and asks helplessly, "What feelings?" Levine's characters are as simultaneously
laughable and recognizable as any out of Sartre.
--Jessica Winter
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