Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North [Mahsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal] (NYRB Classics, 2009)
by Tayeb Salih (translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies)
Sudan, 1966

"It was, gentlemen, after a long absence--seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe--that I returned to my people. I learnt much and much passed me by--but that's another story." (Season of Migration to the North, 3)

Some postcolonial punk recalled this book from me less than a week after I'd checked it out from the library, but he/she might have actually done me a favor by forcing me to read it sooner than I'd intended. Sort of a reverse Heart of Darkness, Season of Migration to the North is a superb short novel that wowed me with its bravura storytelling and its odd, somewhat feverish air. The journey begins when the unnamed narrator returns to his quiet village on the banks of the Nile after spending seven years studying English poetry abroad. One night during a drinking bout, the narrator is astonished when he hears an enigmatic newcomer from Khartoum himself reciting World War I verses in a perfect English accent. How did two British-educated Sudanese intellectuals wind up in the same desolate wadi? And what does the mysterious newcomer have to hide hanging out here in the sticks? The two questions that obsess the narrator begin to take on a haunting quality when Mustafa Sa'eed, the man from Khartoum, confesses to having killed a white woman in Britain and having caused others to commit suicide over him after leaving them abandoned in his romantic wake. Bizarre? Yes. But Salih (1929-2009) is such a master of narrative that both the trajectory of the plot, essentially composed of two equally compelling and intersecting storylines set decades apart in time, and the behavior of the characters practically demand your attention. As befits a work that at least one major critics' group has anointed as the best Arabic novel of the 20th century, Season of Migration to the North of course offers much more than just a gripping plot and an iconic character, Mustafa Sa'eed, who vanishes one day only to linger on as a sort of phantom of memory that torments the narrator with his very presence. The novel is studded with surprising images--the octogenarian grandfather whose unique smell "is a combination of the smell of the large mausoleum in the cemetery and the smell of an infant child" (61), the drought that prompts the narrator to complain that "such land brings forth nothing but prophets" (90). It's also insistently and at times defiantly oral in nature, as when Mustafa Sa'eed repeatedly mumbles "my store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible" (30, 34) and "the train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris" (26, 27, 29) when explaining his techniques for sexual conquest and the mad love affair that would bring him face to face with the British justice system. Salih's poetic qualities notwithstanding, the work is probably most famous for offering its readers a look at the Empire from the point of view of the other side of the table--an "Arab-African" POV (33) in which colonialism is characterized as both a sexual battlefield and an infectious germ that poisons both the oppressor and the oppressed. While I'll leave those rather complicated topics for somebody with more time on their hands to try and suss out, suffice it to say that Season of Migration to the North was as much of a revelation to me as Walser's grand Jakob von Gunten was back in July. Outstanding. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Tayeb Salih

"Season of Migration to the North isn't the first book in which a writer of color has decided to 'write back' to the empire, of course. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between (1965), Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King (1954), and Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (1969), for instance, can all be seen as attempts to subvert European colonial discourse. But Season of Migration to the North is unique among these books in that it is written in the author's native language, rather than the colonial one. Indeed, Salih stands out among African writers of his generation for his insistence on continuing to use Arabic in spite of having lived the majority of his life outside the Sudan. ('It's a matter of principle,' he once told an interviewer.)" (Laila Lalami, "Introduction" to Season of Migration to the North, xiv-xv)

The Story of Zahra

The Story of Zahra [Hikayat Zahra] (Quartet Books, 1986)
by Hanan al-Shaykh (translated from the Arabic by Peter Ford "with the author's cooperation")
Lebanon, 1980

"We had grown used to the idea of a cease-fire at the beginning. We did not dare to think or believe that fighting meant war any more than a cease-fire meant peace." (The Story of Zahra, 106)

I'm not sure why exactly, but I'd half expected that I wasn't going to like this work very much. I was wrong. Oft cited as a classic of contemporary Arabic literature and an important work in international women's studies courses, Zahra pursues its troubled, mentally-disturbed title character from a dysfunctional home in southern Lebanon, on to Africa for a failed marriage, and back to Beirut where she suffers through the ravages of the Lebanese Civil War. Multiple narrators close to Zahra recount their interactions with the character, and Zahra herself bookends the accounts with her own pre-war memories of electroshock therapy and a harrowing account of her wartime "romance" with a rooftop sniper. While al-Shaykh does a tremendous job at bringing the horrors of war home with descriptions of the daily bombings in Beirut, she's equally adept at evoking the profound sense of interior trauma suffered by Zahra (note: I loved the fragmentary nature of the narrative--both the multiple points of view and Zahra's own instability as a witness--for reinforcing these feelings of disconnect). Throughout, one senses that the real horrors for the character aren't the war itself but rather the non-war sources of her own feelings of displacement and exile: the undiagnosed mental health issues that plague her, various abuses at the hands of men, her complicated responses to her own sexuality, and her role as an individual suffering within the stifling, patriarchal culture in which she was raised. That being said, for all the things I admired about the work, for all the interesting things it has to say about colonialism, gender relations and the like, the one thing I didn't care for was a rather big one: the ending. In fact, I'd probably have to read it again before deciding whether it was overly simplistic from a thematic standpoint or an unavoidably logical conclusion to everything that came before it. Bummer. (Quartet Books, London)

Hanan al-Shaykh

The Story of Zahra was self-published when it first came out because it was deemed too hot to handle by regional publishers. For a recent newspaper piece from Hanan al-Shaykh on her mother's life,

see "I Am Too Young to Marry" from The Guardian UK here.

This is my fifth book read for this year's Orbis Terrarum Challenge.
Next up: W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (Germany), Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World], or ??? (???).

Another perspective: E.L. Fay (This Book and I Could Be Friends)

Camilleri vs. Gadda, Damn It!

The Shape of Water [La forma dell'acqua] (Viking Penguin, 2002)
by Andrea Camilleri (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli)
Italy, 1994

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana] (NYRB Classics, 2007)
by Carlo Emilio Gadda (translated from the Italian by William Weaver)
Italy, 1946 & 1957

Whilst the Jane Austen-and-Brontë sisters wing of the US blog mafia might lead you to believe that no new literature of note has been published outside of the United Kingdom since about the middle of the 19th-century, I'd like to spend a few moments on a pair of 20th-century Italian novels anyway. Please bear with me. After a long wait to sample one of his highly-touted Inspector Montalbano mysteries, I finally read Andrea Camilleri's surprisingly gritty The Shape of Water (the first in the Montalbano series) in a couple of sittings recently. It was a good taut weekend read, well-written, with appropriate nods to fellow Sicilian scribes Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia, but it seemed like more of a high-octane genre workout to me than anything special. I mean, I'd read another work of his in a minute if I needed something to while away the time while traveling, but for right now the most impressive thing about Mr. Camilleri as an author is his undeniable resemblance to cable TV icon Junior Soprano! I finished Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana a day later, a bit of misleading symmetry on the book-finishing front since I'd started the novel a month or so prior to The Shape of Water and I can't think of any actors that Gadda even remotely resembles. Although the Milanese Gadda's halting, deliberately digressionary style made it a lot more slow-going a reading experience than Camilleri's bullet train of a crime caper, the narrative difficulties were way more than worth the extra effort required as this brooding, metaphysical tale of a burglary and a subsequent murder in an upscale 1927 Roman apartment building gradually revealed itself to be the literary equivalent of a stunning panorama of the Eternal City at the moment when the fascists were coming into power. While Gadda didn't finish the novel in a way that any fans of old-fashioned literature would ever appreciate, his arresting way with words ("History, past-mistress of life" [299]), his mischievous interior dialogues, and the infamously abrupt ending evoke a sense of modern malaise that feels real enough for me. An underrated classic: that is, if any work can be considered as such when praised by both Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Camilleri

Gadda

"He didn't think, he didn't believe it opportune to think of asking anything, either about the new niece or the new maid. He tried to repress the admiration that Assunta aroused in him: a little like the strange fascination of the dazzling niece of the previous visit: a fascination, an authority wholly Latin and Sabellian, which made her well-suited to the ancient names, of ancient Latin warrior virgins or of not-reluctant wives once stolen by force at the Lupercal, with the suggestion of hills and vineyards and harsh palaces, and with rites and the Pope in his coach, with the fine torches of Sant'Agnese in Agone and Santa Maria Portae Paradisi on Candlemas Day, and the blessing of the candles: a sense of the air of serene and distant days in Frascati or the valley of the Tiber, taken from the girls drawn by Pinelli among Piranesi's ruins, when the ephemerides were heeded and the Church's calendars, and, in their vivid purple, all its high Princes. Like stupendous lobsters. The Princes of Holy Roman Apostolic Church. And in the center those eyes of Assunta's, that pride: as if she were denigrated by serving them at table. In the center...of the whole...Ptolemaic system; yes, Ptolemaic. In the center, meaning no offense, that terrific behind." (That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, 10-11)

Bartleby y compañía

Bartleby y compañía (Anagrama, 2001)
por Enrique Vila-Matas
España, 2000

"Nunca tuve suerte con las mujeres, soporto con resignación una penosa joroba, todos mis familiares más cercanos han muerto, soy un pobre solitario que trabaja en una oficina pavorosa. Por lo demás, soy feliz. Hoy más que nunca porque empiezo --8 de julio de 1999-- este diario que va a ser al mismo tiempo un cuaderno de notas a pie de página que comentarán un texto invisible y que espero que demuestren mi solvencia como rastreador de bartlebys". (Bartleby y compañía, 11)

Bartleby y compañía, llamado así por el personaje de Melville cuyo mantra de "preferiría no hacerlo" es la razón de ser de este libro, ofrece una divertida indagación de un tema bastante raro: el sinnúmero de autores que han dado la espalda a la literatura por renunciar a la escritura. Aunque todos los sospechosos de siempre (Rimbaud, Rulfo, Salinger) tienen sus momentos bajo el microscopio de metaficción del narrador jorobado, hay sorpresas agradables en abundancia en cuanto a los que, como Jacques Vaché, no son autores ("Vaché, paradigma del artista sin obras; está en todas las enciclopedias habiendo escrito tan sólo unas pocas cartas a André Breton y nada más" [74]) y a los que, como Paranoico Pérez, son entes ficticios de otros autores ("Paranoico Pérez no ha conseguido escribir nunca ningún libro, porque cada vez que tenía una idea para uno y se disponía a hacerlo, Saramago lo escribía antes que él. Paranoico Pérez ha acabo trastornado. Su caso es una variante interesante del síndrome de Bartleby" [135]). Mientras que pienso que Vila-Matas podría haber eligido escribir esta obra como una recopilación de ensayos literarios en vez de esta especie de antinovela al estilo de Borges y J. Rodolfo Wilcock, me imagino que su elección del género le dió la libertad máxima para parodiar el único territorio desconocido de la novela al amanecer del milenio nuevo: lo que su narrador clasifica como "la literatura del No" [12]. ¡Qué bien!

"'El arte es una estupidez', dijo Jacques Vaché, y se mató, eligió la vía rápida para convertirse en artista del silencio. En este libro no va a haber mucho espacio para bartlebys suicidas, no me interesan demasiado, pues pienso que en la muerte por propia mano faltan los matices, las sutiles invenciones de otros artistas --el juego, a fin de cuentas, siempre más imaginativo que el disparo en la sien-- cuando les llega la hora de justificar su silencio" (74). (http://www.anagrama-ed.es/)

Vila-Matas #1

*
Bartleby & Co. (New Directions, 2004)
by Enrique Vila-Matas (translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne)
Spain, 2000

"I never had much luck with women. I have a pitiful hump, which I am resigned to. All my closest relatives are dead. I am a poor recluse working in a ghastly office. Apart from that, I am happy. Today most of all because, on this day 8 July 1999, I have begun this diary that is also going to be a book of footnotes commenting on an invisible text, which I hope will prove my reliability as a tracker of Bartlebys." (Bartleby & Co., 1)

Taking its name from the Melville character whose "I would prefer not to" mantra provides this book's reason for being and nothingness, Bartleby & Co. offers up a sly, endlessly entertaining look at the astonishing number of authors who have turned their backs on literature by giving up writing. While all the usual suspects (Rimbaud, Rulfo, Salinger) have their moment in the hunchbacked narrator's arch metafictional sun, surprises abound to the extent that you're just as likely to encounter a reference to a non-writer like Jacques Vaché ("Vaché, paradigm of the artist without works; he is listed in all the encyclopedias, though he wrote only a few letters to André Breton and nothing else" [68]) as you are to come across a story about a story about the fictional character who dreamed that Saramago was stealing all his ideas telepathically ["Paranoid Pérez never managed to write a single book because, each time he had an idea for one and resolved to do something about it, Saramago would write it before him. Paranoid Pérez ended up going round the bend. His case is an interesting variant of Bartleby's syndrome" [131]). Although I suspect that Vila-Matas could have just as easily chosen to write this Jorge Luis Borges and J. Rodolfo Wilcock-inspired "anti-novel" as a series of literary essays instead, his selection of this particular format prob. allowed him maximum freedom to spoof the medium's only uncharted road at the dawn of the new milennium: what his narrator refers to as "the literature of the No" [2]. Too funny!

"'Art is a stupidity,' said Jacques Vaché, and then he killed himself, choosing the quick way to become an artist of silence. There won't be much room in this book for suicide Bartlebys, I'm not too interested in them, since I think taking one's own life lacks the nuances, the subtle inventions of other artists--the game, in short, which is always more imaginative than a shot in the head--when called on to justify their silence" (68). (http://www.ndpublishing.com/)

"Vila-Matas" #1

The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women

The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (Beacon Press hardcover, 2007)
by Nicola Denzey
USA, 2007

Less a work of history in the traditional textual sense than an exercise in "reading" visual evidence from funerary art and epigraphic sources, Nicola Denzey's The Bone Gatherers offers up some fresh, interdisciplinary perspectives on the role(s) of Christian women in 4th-century Rome. Through the course of a series of case studies centered on various Roman catacombs and crypts, Denzey argues that "the images of women that speak to us in the material and visual evidence from the catacombs tell a radically different story" about the status of these women than the "official" one manufactured at the very time when church fathers were just ramping up their efforts to condemn females for being the descendents of Eve (pp. 80-81). While I don't claim to be any sort of an expert on all this, it seems clear to this uber-geek reader at least that Denzey, a Lecturer on the Study of Religion at Harvard, makes a very convincing case that's what's left of the world of the bone gatherers points to a different and more privileged position for women--as matrons of the arts, as martyrs, as sacred caregivers--than the "historic record" might lead one to believe after centuries of neglect and/or obfuscation by predominantly male church authorities. Whether this type of academic work is up your own uber-geek alley is another question, of course, but I found it interesting enough to recommend to those archeologically-inclined in general and to those pagans and Christians following along at the Art History and Support Your Local Library reading challenges in particular. A solid study. (http://www.beacon.org/)

Prof. Nicola Denzey

Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway

Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway (Charles Scribner's Sons hardcover, 1992)
by John Dunning
USA, 1992

For all this book's rather serious shortcomings (faux tough guy patter that almost always rings false, an uninteresting protagonist, side stories involving a thug and a love interest that lack all credibility whatsoever), I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I actually enjoyed much of this thriller's plot. While some of that likely only had to do with the particular subculture explored in the novel, the world of book dealers and book scouts in Denver's used/rare book trade, I feel I must grudgingly give Mr. Dunning some pre-Da Vinci Code-style credit for pumping out a mystery that was almost as entertaining as it was preposterous! Rating: Eat a big bag of these and then tell me how you feel! (http://www.simonandschuster.net/)

John Dunning and his poseur hat

The Land of Little Rain

The Land of Little Rain (The Modern Library Classics paperback, 2003)
by Mary Austin
USA, 1903

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls." --The Land of Little Rain, p. 10

Although The Land of Little Rain is very slow moving in parts, I liked this slender 109-page nature-writing classic quite a bit more than I would've expected from just a quick glance at that horrid New Age cover on my library copy above. Austin's prose is suitably spare and unadorned throughout this series of 14 non-fiction vignettes on life in the harsh southern California desert, but she has a great eye for detail and an unconventional point of view that provide for constant surprises when leafing through her work (to provide just one example, Austin is as likely to decry an act of violence with an unexpectedly secular aside--"Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall have a hand in the heaven of hereafter" [40]--as she is to attribute John Muir's profound love of the natural world to his status as "a devout man" in another passage [95]). Geographically focused on the areas near the Mojave Desert and the Owens Valley in California where the author lived at the dawn of the 20th century, the Land of Little Rain's thematic concerns embrace the flora and fauna of the region, the itinerant gold prospectors still looking for their lucky strike, and--perhaps most interesting of all over a century later--Austin's interactions with the Paiute and Shoshone Indians and the Mexican settlers of her adopted home. Discovering that the midwest transplant and single mom Austin was so appreciative of these different cultures in an age notorious for intolerance of all kinds makes me want to learn more about this gifted writer sooner rather than later. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. (http://www.modernlibrary.com/)

Mary Austin

The Modern Library edition of The Land of Little Rain includes a fine biographical sketch by Robert Hass, but other versions of the text are available online for free due to its status as a public domain work. For a good recent blog entry about Austin and her life, check out Prof. Peter Richardson's self-titled blog on Californian culture here.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (Oxford University Press hardcover, 1997)
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (translated from the Portuguese by Gregory Rabassa)
Brazil, 1881

"For some time I debated over whether I should start these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, that is, whether I should put my birth or my death in first place. Since common usage would call for beginning with birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly a writer who is dead but a dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle; the second is that the writing would be more distinctive and novel in that way. Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn't place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch." --The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 7

Like Machado de Assis' equally entertaining Dom Casmurro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a fake autobiography--written with "a playful pen and melancholy ink" (5)--concerned with events that take place in the late 19th century Brazil of its one-time upper crust protagonist. It's also a tragicomic send-up of the man of letters revealing the mysteries of life through literature, the twist here being that its voluble narrator, dead of pneumonia at the age of 64, inexplicably chose to launch his writing career from the other side of eternity. Chapter 1, "The Author's Demise," covers many of the essential autobiographical details, but elsewhere in his book of life Brás Cubas recounts his ill-starred love affairs and failed political ambitions with great panache, an unbridled wit, and a generous dollop of pessimism. He has a poetic way with words ("I was holding the binoculars of the imagination," he quips in a typical moment [100]), but he also knows when to take a breather when necessary (chapter 139, "How I Didn't Get to Be Minister of States," has no words at all, only telling ellipses). In short, he's almost everything you could want in a narrator except that he knows things about the modern reader that you might not want to hear. A great jab in the eye of conventional fiction/memoir writing marred only by some of the worst proofreading (typos every few pages) I've ever seen in a university press book. (http://www.oup.com/)

"I'm beginning to regret this book. Not that it bores me, I have nothing to do and, really, putting together a few meager chapters for that other world is always a task that distracts me from eternity a little. But the book is tedious, it has the smell of the grave about it; it has a certain cadaveric contraction about it, a serious fault, insignificant to boot because the main defect of this book is you, reader. You're in a hurry to grow old and the book moves slowly. You love direct and continuous narration, a regular and fluid style, and this book and my style are like drunkards, they stagger left and right, they walk and stop, mumble, yell, cackle, shake their fists at the sky, stumble and fall...

And they do fall! Miserable leaves of my cypress of death, you shall fall like any others, beautiful and brilliant as you are. And, if I had eyes, I would shed a nostalgic tear for you. This is the great advantage of death, which if it leaves no mouth with which to laugh, neither does it leave eyes with which to weep... You shall fall." --The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, p. 111

Machado de Assis: For more on "Brazil's most important novelist," a grandson of freed slaves, see Marc Bain's "Speak, Memory" in Newsweek here.

Next port of call on the Orbis Terrarum Challenge 2009: Canada (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin), Cuba (José Lezama Lima, Paradiso), or ??? (???).

God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (Free Press paperback, 2008)
by Richard Grant
USA, 2008

"If someone had come up to me in my early twenties, when men are supposed to be at their most reckless, and offered me a fortune to go into a place like the Sierra Madre, I would have thought about it for about three seconds before saying no. Except for alcohol and drugs, I was a fairly cautious young man, afraid of heights, roller coasters, high-speed driving, the police, guns, snakes, big spiders, and venereal disease. I avoided fights and adventure sports and I tended to doubt the sanity of those who put themselves deliberately in harm's way, much as some people now doubt my own sanity. So what happened?" --God's Middle Finger, p. 16

I checked this out from the library last week as a change of pace from more serious reading I had going on, but it quickly took over to the point that those serious plans wound up shelved. Part travelogue/part one-man Mexican Jackass episode, God's Middle Finger is a hysterical account of the three months that the British-born/Tucson-based journalist/thrill seeker Grant spent chasing adventure in the Sierra Madre mountain range. Although some of his "research" involved things like binge drinking with new friends and doing coke off knives in bathrooms with the local cops, Grant survived to tell the tale and his journalistic chops served him well even when his judgement probably didn't. Here's an example. In trying to figure out the intense hold that the region held on his imagination, Grant questioned locals from all walks of life on subjects as diverse as the mystery surrounding the fate of the last Apaches, the effects of the drug trade on the area in recent times, the prodigious long-distance running feats of the Tarahumara Indians, and the historic roots of the bandit culture. The result is an entertaining, informative and surprisingly well-written traveler's tale that should provide great adventure reading fare for those skeptical of the idea that all narcotraficantes are saints. Includes a nice recap of previous writing on the Sierra Madre region and some of the most hilarious translations of Mexican profanities I've ever seen! (http://www.simonandschuster.com/)

Richard Grant

Click here for a 5-minute Arizona public TV interview with Grant about this book from April 2008.

Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York's Trial of the Century

Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York's Trial of the Century (Crown hardback, 2007)
by Mike Dash
UK, 2007

Since I'm suddenly behind on all my reading challenges except for the one that hasn't started yet, I'm glad that the 400+ page Satan's Circus will at least count for one of them. A meticulously-researched look into NYPD Lieutenant Charles Becker's death sentence for the murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal in 1912, the book's at its best evoking the period flavor of the Satan's Circus area--here described as the stretch of turf ranging vertically between 23rd and 57th Streets and bounded laterally by 6th and 10th Avenues--or what the author calls "the most glamorous, notorious square mile on earth" (p. 5) for its infamous all-night drinking, gambling, and prostitution district. Dash is strong at setting his main story within its historical and political contexts, linking the Becker case to just one stage among many in the rise of police corruption and reform movements in pre-Times Square Manhattan. Unfortunately, the parts dedicated to the "trial of the century" itself didn't really do it for me. Despite a colorful cast of real-life characters and a case in which a dirty cop seems to have been successfully framed for murder by an even more unscrupulous hoodlum, this chronicle never really connected with me as much as I would have liked. It's a good to very good read that fans of New York history should appreciate, but it probably could have used a little more dirt on the entertainment district to liven it up for everybody else--or at least me! (http://www.crownpublishing.com/)

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity (Feral House paperback, 2006)
by Mel Gordon
USA, 2006

Racy biography of Weimar Germany dancer/drug addict/silent movie star Anita Berber (1899-1928), a woman Gordon calls "the single most decadent personality" of her times (p. ii) before setting out to prove it in the pages that follow (to be fair, Gordon also takes pains to stress that Berber was as dedicated to her art as she was to any of her other addictions). Anyone inclined to a good wallow in the filth should enjoy some of the juicier revelations about Berber's defiantly unrestrained lifestyle, and those who just want some sort of a background context on the performing arts in the silent era will find it in abundance in passages having to do with the "naked dance" movement, Berlin's cabaret and club scene, and the fine line between the entertainment business and prostitution in the '20s. While some of the more scandalous moments in the bio lack consistency regarding the citation of sources, that minor drawback and an occasionally overheated tone are a small price to pay to gain access to this absolutely fascinating world brought back to life by Gordon with the help of over 200 personal photos, poster reproductions, and publicity stills rescued from the bins of avant-garde oblivion. Tremendously entertaining! (http://www.feralhouse.com/)

Mel Gordon

The Day of the Owl

The Day of the Owl (New York Review Books paperback, 2003)
by Leonardo Sciascia (translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver)
Italy, 1961

"'Who is it?' asked the conductor, pointing at the body. No one answered. The conductor cursed. Among passengers of that route he was famous for his highly skilled blaspheming. The company had already threatened to fire him, since he never bothered to control himself even when there were nuns or priests on the bus. He was from the province of Syracuse and had had little to do with violent death: a soft province, Syracuse. So now he swore all the more furiously." (The Day of the Owl, p. 10)

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) is often described as a crime writer, which I suppose he was, but I get the feeling that that label is as limiting and meaningless as calling Borges a short story writer. In his 124-page novella The Day of the Owl (first published in Italian as Il Giorno della Civetta and also translated into English as Mafia Vendetta), Sciascia does indeed write a story that takes a shocking murder as its starting point--but the mystery has to do with the reasons for the cover-up as much as the solution to the crime itself. The essential details are as follows. In a small Sicilian town, a man is shot dead in the middle of a crowded piazza as he attempts to board an early morning bus. Despite the presence of many potential eyewitnesses, nobody is willing to step forward to explain what they saw for fear of potential mafia retribution. A mainland carabinieri officer temporarily stationed in the area, the wonderfully-drawn Captain Bellodi, attempts to figure out and eventually resolves the motives for the initial killing as well as the subsequent ones that inevitably follow, but both his investigation and the pursuit of justice itself are constantly thwarted by a Sicilian culture that he's only gradually beginning to understand. Bellodi's status as an outsider from Parma allows Sciascia, himself a Sicilian, to comment on the captain's frustrations from both sides of the north-south cultural divide. With prose that is both psychologically astute and often unexpectedly funny, this sociological perspective on Sicily circa 1961 adds an extra dimension to an already-interesting police procedural narrative--making this almost too good to be true in the entertainment department. A splendid read. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Leonardo Sciascia

(1989 NY Times obituary here)

Support Your Local Library Challenge

Since I couldn't even make it a full month into my harebrained plan to go a year without books, I've decided to join the 2009 Support Your Local Library Challenge in recognition of my status as "easy prey" for book dealers everywhere. While I have no delusions that signing up to read 12, 25 or even 50 library books in 2009 will cure me of the need to purchase every other book I touch, I'm curious to see whether commiting to read a library book a week (my goal = 50, to be chosen from the "local library" right outside my office at work) will help break me of the habit...somewhat. In any event, all my reviews for the challenge will be linked here below as I get to them. See you later in the stacks!

• 1/50: Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl (review)
• 2/50: Mel Gordon, The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity (review)
• 3/50: Mike Dash, Satan's Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York's Trial of the Century (review)
• 4/50: Richard Grant, God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (review)
• 5/50: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (review)
• 6/50: Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (review)
• 7/50: John Dunning, Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway (review)
• 8/50: Nicola Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (review)
• 9/50: Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby y compañía [Bartleby & Co.] (review)
• 10/50: Andrea Camilleri, The Shape of Water [La forma dell'acqua] (review)
• 11/50: Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra (review)
• 12/50: Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (review)