No title

/';-=09

)(8*=-0/']

H^^^H

tB^X

mam

H&^

":'-^'l

.

,^T\

\

.

\^M,-.

;

HHI^Hi

contributors

Gabriel Ba

Andrew D. Arnold

Eddie Campbell

Fabio Moon

Anders Nilsen

has been writing about comics for Timemagazineand its website for over five years.You can readhis past works at www.time.com/comix. He lives in Brooklyn.

Eddie Campbell

is the authorof TheFateof theArtist(FirstSecondBooks)and co-author(with Alan Moore)of FromHell,published by Top Shelf Books.

Armando Celayo

has been an editorialassistantat WLTsince 2005.He also serves as co-editorof WLT2and Windmill,the University of Oklahoma'stwo student-runliteraryjournals.

J. Madison Davis

is the authorof severalcrimenovels and nonfictionbooks, most recentlyTheVanGoghConspiracy (2005)and Conspiracy and the Freemasons:How the Secret Society and Their Enemies Shapedthe Modern World(2006). He serves as

regionalvice presidentof the North Americanbranchof the InternationalAssociationof CrimeWritersand teaches novel and film-scriptwriting in the ProfessionalWritingProgramof the GaylordCollege of Journalism& Mass Communicationat the Universityof Oklahoma. Nick Flynn

Bunmi Ishola

Chris Lanier

Ashley Lin Ling Chuan-Yao

Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

has published two books of poetry.His first,SomeEther,won the PEN/Joyce OsterweilAward. His second, Blind Huber,was published in 2002.His most recentbook is AnotherBullshitNightin SuckCity,which won the PEN/ MarthaAlbrandAward for the Art of the Memoir.His work has been publishedin the New Yorker,the ParisReview, and many othermagazinesand journals.No strarlgerto collaboration,Flynnwas involved in the productionof the AcademyAward-nominatedDarwin'sNightmare(2006).Othercollaborativeeffortshave involved dance,film, music, and visual arts.He spends one semesterper year at the Universityof Houston,where he has co-taughta course in artisticcollaboration. has been interningwith WLTsince summer2006.She graduatedfrom TexasA&MUniversitywith a bachelor's degree in Journalismand Englishin May 2006and is hoping to startgraduateschool in journalismin fall 2007. is a cartoonist,animator,and writer.His comic Combustion (FantagraphicsBooks, 1999)is an homage to the woodcut novel. He is currentlyearninghis MFAat the Universityof Californiaat Davis and working on his latest graphicnovel. is currentlyan honors student at the Universityof Oklahoma.She is seeking a degree in creativewriting. has been an editorialinternat WLTsince summer2006.A native of Singapore,he is currentlyseeking a degree in professionalwriting at the Universityof Oklahoma. who are twins, live and work in Sao Paulo, Brazil,where they began self-publishingin 1993.Fouryears laterthey began drawing theirfirstwork that would grabthe attentionof the Brazilianpublic, 10 Paezinhos,which has become the standardfor independentcomics publishingin Brazil.Theirwork first appearedin the United Statesin 1999, when they served as illustratorsfor the miniseriesRoland.At that time, they still hoped to write superherocomicsby theirown account,they were fortunateto fail miserably.In 2003they were publishedalongside longtime and they influenceWill Eisnerand severalothercomic-booklegends in the DarkHorse collectionAutobiographix, releasedthe novella Ursulain 2004.DarkHorse published their firstwidespreadU.S. release,De:Tales,in 2006.Both

Yuyi Morales

Rob Vollmar

David Shook, LingChuan-Yao, and Armando Celayo

twins sometimesillustratefor U.S. authorsand Braziliannewspapers.Ba designed and illustratedthe frontcover for the currentissue. Yuyi Morales

is an author,artist,puppetmaker,folk dancerand was the host of her own Spanish-languageradioprogramfor children.Otherbooks she has written and/or illustratedincludeJusta Minute:A Trickster TaleandCountingBook, winner of the PuraBelpreMedal;HarvestingHope:TheStoryof CesarChavez,a PuraBelpreHonorBook;and Los GatosBlackon Halloween.She has also receivedthe JaneAddams and ChristopherAwards for her work. Bornin Veracruz,Mexico,Moralesnow makesher home in the San Franciscoarea.

Josh Neufeld

A native New Yorker,JoshNeufeld's comics abouthis travelexperiencesin SoutheastAsia and CentralEurope are told in the XericAward-winning graphicnovel A FewPerfectHours.He is the creatorof the comicbook The and the co-creatorof Keyholeand Titansof Finance:TrueTalesof MoneyandBusiness.Joshhas been a Vagabonds artist for Harvey Pekar'sAmericanSplendorand has contributedto many comics anthologies.His comics longtime the have also appearedin ReadyMade, the VillageVoice,FortuneSmallBusiness,the AustinAmerican-Statesman, ChicagoReader,the CommonReview,and In TheseTimesand have been translatedinto Frenchand Serbian.Josh resides in Brooklyn,New York,and makes a living mixing comics with freelanceillustration.You can find his work online at joshcomix.com.

Anders Nilsen

is the artistand authorof Big Questions,Monologues' for theComingPlague,Don'tGoWhereI Can'tFollow,and Dogs andWater,which won an IgnatzAward. His work has been translatedinto severallanguagesand has been featured in BestAmericanNon-required Ergot,and Momealong with otherpublications Reading,BestAmericanComics,Kramer's and anthologies.Bornin northernNew Hampshirein 1973,Anders grew up there and in Minneapolisand went to school in New Mexicoto study paintingand installationbeforeeventuallymoving to Chicagoto go to graduate school at the Schoolof the Art Institute.He dropped out aftera year to devote his time and energy to drawing comics and otherartwork.He currentlylives and works in Chicago.

Elif Shafak

David Shook Stephen E. Tabachnick

Rob Vollmar

is the authorof five previous novels and a collectionof essays, including,most recently,TheGazeand TheSaintof IncipientInsanities,her first novel writtenin English.In Turkeyshe has won the MevlanaPrize for literatureas well as the TurkishNovel Award;TheBastardof Istanbulwas a best-sellerthere.She splits her time between Istanbul and Tucson,Arizona,where she is an assistantprofessorof Near EasternStudies at the Universityof Arizona.Her Post,the LosAngelesTimes,and the WallStreetJournal,and she has been op-ed pieces have run in the Washington featuredon NationalPublicRadio.Her essay on soft power and the role of Turkishintellectualsappearedin the January2006issue of WLT. has been an editorialinternat WLTsince spring 2006. is chairof the Englishdepartmentat the Universityof Memphisand the author,most recently,of FiercerThan (2004).He is currentlyediting Tigers:TheLifeandWorksof RexWarner(2002)and Lawrence ofArabia:An Encyclopedia TeachingtheGraphicNovel,a collectionof originalessays, for the ModernLanguageAssociation. is a writerof and about comics from Norman,Oklahoma.His second graphicnovel with artistPabloG. Callejo, Bluesman,is due for releasein its collectedform in summer2007from NBMPublishing.

4sDt

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H

March-April 2007

EXECUTIVEDIRECTOR& NEUSTADT PROFESSOR

EDITOR IN CHIEF

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Maria Johnson

ART DIRECTOR

ASSISTANT EDITOR

ACCOUNTS SPECIALIST

Rimvydas Silbajoris Han Stavans Theodore Ziolkowski

David Draper Clark Daniel Simon

MARKETING DIRECTOR

Roger Allen Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda Manuel Duran Howard Goldblatt George Gomori Talat S. Halman Alamgir Hashmi Vasa D. Mihailovich Tanure Ojaide

Robert Con Davis-Undiano

MANAGING EDITOR

CIRCULATIONMANAGER

EDITORIALBOARD

Volume 81, Number 2

CONTRIBUTINGEDITORS

Pamela Genova Emily Johnson Rainer Schulte ASSOCIATE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Mohammad Alhawary Jose Juan Colin J. Madison Davis Yoshiko Fukushima Mary Margaret Holt Andrew Horton Jason Houston Dustin Howard Michael Lee Jonathan Stalling

Victoria Vaughn Terri D. Stubblefield Merleyn Ruth Bell Michelle Johnson Kay Blunck

STUDENT INTERNS

BOARD OF VISITORS

Tyler Allen Sydneyann Binion Amy Dawn Bourlon Alexis Caldwell Armando Celayo Josh Davis Darlene Dillon Olubunmi Ishola Lisa K. Janssen Amanda Kehrberg Elizabeth Lewis Ashley Lin Ling Chuan-Yao Patrick Maddox Allison Meier Jeanetta Calhoun Mis Will O'Donnell Jennifer Sanders David Shook Charlie Swanson Amanda Theaker Jessica Walker Marie Zelaya

Molly Shi Boren S. Ross Clarke Cheryl Foote Groenendyke Sarah C. Hogan Judy Zarrow Kishner Mary D. Nichols Susan Neustadt Schwartz George A. Singer Jeanne Hoffman Smith Lela Sullivan James R. Tolbert III,Chair Lew 0. Ward Martha Griffin White Penny Williams

www.worldliteraturetoday.com World Literature Today is published bimonthly at the Universityof Oklahoma / 630 ParringtonOval, Suite 110 /Norman, Oklahoma 73071-4033. Periodicalspostage paid at Norman, Oklahoma 73070. Copyright © 2007 by World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the Universityof Oklahoma. Advertising and subscription rates are listed on our website or are available through the editorial office. Ph: 405.325.4531 . Fax:405.325.7495. 6,600 copies of this publication were printed at no cost to the taxpayers of the State of Oklahoma.

letted Crisis and Renewal I am pleasedto see WorldLiterature Todaycontinueto explorethe significant themes of our times. In your July-August 2006 issue, there is so much to comment on- and such a wide rangeof possibilitiesto reflect on for the futureof our planet- that I could have chosen at will from the various essays, interviews, and literaryexamples.Instead,I will focus on the contrastbetween hope and despair exemplifiedin some of the selections. On the one hand, there is the grim world of despairfor the women in Algiers as portrayed in Assia Djebar's work, and it may well serve as a symbol of a more general crisis in Western civilization:How do we as Westerners"get inside the heads" of people of other cultures sufficiently to see them with a combinationof compassion and a willingness to assist them but always, and only, from their point of view, from theirperspectiveoutside of Westernculture,and not try to make them become like us? At the same time as our planet continues its mysterioustrek through the cosmos, there is always hope for at least a better understandingof this world, here and now, a quiet hope, as in the last lines of "My Favorite Kingdom/7by Li-Young Lee: "And the birds go there / bearing the weight of every sky." Or, as Kwame Dawes puts it in "Islanders": "the notion of family, the smell of

history- / and journeyis a memory of what we are to live." We live in fluid times, where cultures migrate, flow across the increasinglymeaningless boundaries, borders,and frontiersof nationstates, and poets, like all artists,are in exile everywhere and nowhere and at home nowhere and everywhere. Aesthetics reflects this fluidity, also, in Maria Benitez's flamenco that returnsto Spain and to the world her highly personalinterpretation of the music and dance of Andalucia. To add one more note: this triumph of a committed aestheticsover shallower,more limited, more denigrating,and less imaginative views of the human conditionis convincinglyillustrated in the interview with Yo-Yo Ma. The Silk Road Project's aim "to exploreartisticexchangesand international collaborations"is breathtakingly refreshing. It points the way to the kinds of international artisticcollaborationsthat could set an example for all areas of human endeavor. Or is that too much to hope for?I hope not. E. A. Mares Albuquerque,New Mexico

On Poetry and Bookstores Thereis nothing wrong with Barnes & Noble, Borders,or even Amazon, but for readers, scholars, and bibliophiles who care more about the book than bargainsor convenience,

thereis nothing like a literarybookstore. Lamentably,the independent bookshop must struggle to survive because chains can purchase material at such steep discounts that smaller stores cannot compete financially;additionally, one must travel considerablyfartherthan the localmall in orderto visit, for example, the now defunctShakespeare& Co. And yet a purposefultrip to the GothamBookmartin New Yorkor Cody's in Berkeley(currentlylimited to one location)is very different than a quickpurchaseof Needlecraft for Dummiesat Waldenbooks.In the distant past, one could spot Tennessee Williams wrapping books (unsuccessfully,which led to his firing) at the Gothamor, more recently, FrancisSteloff,the founder,hard at work at her desk, although she was one hundredyears old. Eudora Welty or Jorge Luis Borges would

March -April 2007 1 3

A very colorful note from Zia Matoori, one of our subscribers in Columbia, Missouri.

cTi

stop by, and anyone could locate treasuresburied away in the basement(e.g.,multiplecopies of firsteditionsthatHenryMiller and his peers had sent along forty or fifty years earlier). It is thereforeastonishingthat the ElectronicPoetryCenter (epc)lists twelve stores that specialize in verse, two of which deal exclusively in poetry: the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge,Massachusetts,and Open Booksin Seattle,which Laura Wideburgprofiles so lovingly in your July-August 2006 issue ("Outposts,"page 80). The Grolier,which has purveyed poetry for almost eighty years and stocks fifteen thousandtitles, is not a direct competitorof Open Books, since it lies three thousand miles away. Instead,these two shops balancethe country,drawing poetry aficionados from various distant locations to their doors. "Poetryis strong medicine,"insists TerryHauptman.It can be found in abundancein the specialtybookshops. RobertHauptman St. Cloud State University

Letters to the editor are welcome and may be e-mailed to [email protected] or sent care of: WLT Letters 630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110 University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 73019-4033 USA can be printed, and those letters Not all correspondence chosen may be edited for clarity and space as needed. The editors and publishers assume no responsibility for contributors' opinions.

Poncia Vicencio by Concei^aO EvariSto/ translatedby PalomaMartinez-Cruz Poncia.Vicencio, the debut novel by Afro-Brazilianauthor Conceicao Evansto, is the story of a young Afro-Brazilianwoman'sjourneyfrom the land of her enslaved ancestors to the emptiness of urban life. However,the generationsof creativity,violence and familycannotbe so easilyleft behind as Ponciais heir to a mysteriouspsychicgift from her grandfather.Does tinsgift have the powerto bringPonciabackfromthe emotionalvacuum and absolute solitude that has overtakenher in the city? Do the elementalforcesof earth,air,fireandwatermeananythingin the barrenurbanlandscape?Tins mysticalstory of family,dreamsand hope by the incomparableEvansto, illuminatesaspects of urban and rural Afro-Brazilianconditionswith poetic eloquenceand rawurgency. 9~8-O-924O4~-33-6 - $20.00 hardcover 9~8-O-924O4~-34-3 - S 12.00 softcover 5 ' ' x 8 ' "' 140 page^

I^^2^ffl!^5^^^^ 4 I World Literature Today

ddESoif § DHoSi As the editors of WorldLiterature Todaystrive to offer extensive coverageof contemporarywriting fromthroughoutthe world, we realizethatwith rapidlychanging global technology- especiallywith regardto the electronicscreen(e.g., video games, the Internet,cable television)- the medium of the book has often taken on hybridelementsin termsof formatand visual presentation. With that in mind, the current issue of WLTfocuses on graphic literature, which is read by millions of readers throughout the globe stretchingfrom Belgium,Germany,Iran,and Indiato Japan,Cuba,Mexico,and the United States. Many authors in the West who had traditionallybeen representedby theirtexts alone have occasionallyincorporatedgraphic elements in their work similar to those identified with comic books. Julio Cortazar(Argentina;1914-84)provided one such examplewith the publicationof his Fantomascontralos vampirosmultinacionales(1977),and, more recently,Paul Auster (usa) with Cityof Glass(1985)as well as LauraEsquivel (Mexico)with La ley del amor(1995;Eng. TheLawof Love, 1996;replete with a cd). Clearerexamples of the rise in popularityof the graphic novel areevidencedby such full-timepractitionersof the genreas FabioMoonand GabrielBa (Brazil),MarjaneSatrapi(Iran),and RobVollmar(usa). Eddie Campbell{seepage13) readilyacknowledgesthe confusionrepresented by the deceptively simple phrase graphicnovelby defining its layeredmeanings and connotations.For some, graphicnovels are synonymous with comic books, yet they can also representcomics that are presented in hard- or softbound formats like books ratherthan as the stapled sheets we've come to associatewith most traditional comics and many magazines. Campbell further explains that graphicnovels also presentcomic-booknarrativesthat are equivalentin form and dimension to those of the prose novel. And finally, graphicnovels have come to assume a form that looks like comic books but is more ambitiousand substantive in their scope. We have attemptedto present various perspectiveson and examples of the genre in light of the growing confluenceof word, picture,and typographythat is becomingincreasinglyprevalentin publishing.The genre'simportanceis undeniable as it continues to reach a wider audience worldwide and as the visual arts continueto occupy a commandingpresencein our lives. The currentissue marks somewhat of a departurefrom our regularfare but is consistentwith our desire to keep abreastof new literatureand literaryforms, wherever and whenever they occur.In addition to the expertiseprovided by our individualcontributorslisted on the tableof contents,our specialsectionon graphic literatureis due in large part to the vision and hard work of WLTinternsDavid Shook, Ling Chuan-Yao,Armando Celayo, Olubunmi Ishola, and Ashley Lin, along with our staff membersMariaJohnson,MichelleJohnson,VictoriaVaughn, and TerriStubblefield.Special thanks are also due WLT'sart director,Merleyn Bell, and managing editor, Daniel Simon, who helped coordinateproductionof the project,and, finally,to our executivedirector,RobertCon Davis-Undiano,who works tirelesslyto diversify our coverage. c^y^^^c

<X?l^y^

us

f^^a^\^4^

March-April 2007 15

|

I

CC^ rime

-^^

1

A

! NT

E

RN

AT

' ON

AL

6l Myst ^^ J. MADISON DAVIS

HIS "CUSTOMERS" WERETHE JURY MICKEYSPILLANE(1918-2006)

STUDENTOF MINE SOme

years ago told me how he had taken a summer job in the Charleston, South Carolina, area as a house painter and was told to go to the Morrison house at Murrells Inlet. Usually, homeownerscan'twait to get away fromthe mess and the smell,but Mr. Morrison (so they thought) hung around, chatting without barking orders, bringing them cool drinks. He was charming and funny, but they were getting a little tired of his persistence. They asked him from what business he had retired. "I'mnot retired/' he laughed. "I'm a writer/' Suddenly, then, they knew why he had seemed familiar. "FrankMorrison"was FrankMorrison Spillane: "Mickey Spillane," perhaps the only living novelist recognizable enough to appear in one hundred Miller Lite beer commercials. Over the next few days, they asked Spillane many of the usual questionsnonwritersask published writers. Where do you get your ideas? How many hours a day do you write? How long does it take you to write a book? His answers seemed flippant, like jokes he had repeated many times. He didn't get ideas; he just started.He wrote however many hours he needed to get finished. How long it took to write a book depended on alimony, when the rent was due, and blown

6

World Literature Today

gaskets. Once, he said, desperate for money, he had written a novel on a weekend. In September 1989 HurricaneHugo crashedinto South Carolina,destroyinghis house, and it was only a matterof weeks before Spillane was on the TonightShow promotingTheKillingMan,his first

Mike Hammernovel since 1970,to pay for repairs. According to legend, he wrote his first novel I, the Jury (1947) in nine days, in order to get $1,000 for a piece of land. Once, he told the house painters, he had been takinga manuscriptto the publisherand lost it. Thatmust

z X o < DC


u z< z > CO X

Q_ < QC

o o X

WhenI was an undergraduate,in the 1960s,filled with dreamsaboutthe artI might try to make and terrifiedby the worriessuch dreamingbroughtwith it, I wrote WilliamStyrona letter.I can'trecall how I found his address,but I rememberit well: WilliamStyron.Styron's Acres.Roxbury,Connecticut. And I do rememberwhat I wrote. It had to do with a story I had writtenabout a subjectthat,at the time,was quitetaboo- and who was I to know thatit was a silly shot in the dark,to write to the man who by thattime had establishedhimself as one of the majorliteraryfiguresof his generationand to ask an undergraduatequestion?- but he wrote back,in kindly, avuncularfashion,saying to me that he himself had tried to write a story when he was aroundthe same age as I was then aboutthe same subjectand not to worry . . . not to worry. (I wish I had the letterto quote directly,but who knows into what dustbinI tossed it afterrunningmy fingersa numberof times acrossthe embossedreturn address . . . Styron'sAcres,Roxbury,Connecticut.) Needless to say, he was one of those starsI steeredby for many years,a writerwith a deep conscienceand a broadgrasp of human characterand history,a novelist who dared to take on the great subjectsof his time- slavery,rebellion,the death camps and genocide . . . and, later,depressionand life's deep end- and gracefullyfielded the criticism,sometimesquite voluble and even threatening, that his work drew because of it. He made it seem like a great enterprise,and like his cohortsand contemporaries,JamesJones and Norman Mailer,gave us the impressionthat novel-writingwas a contactsport at which only the daringand brave tried theirtalents. LieDown in Darkness,which Styronpublished in 1951when he was only twenty-six,was one of the great debuts in twentieth-centuryAmericanfictionand held the attentionof droves of young writershoping to make as big an entrance,fromits hypnoticopening all the way throughto its stunning, patheticsuicide of the main characterat the end.

March-April 2007 19

OFTHEAIR Then came his marvelousnovella based on an incident from his life in the Marine Corps, The Long March. Next, Set This House on Fire, with its glori-

ous set-piece of a drive along the Italiancoast and its descriptionof a Sundaymorningin New YorkCity curled up with the newspapers.I can still see the dense type of its pages that I read and reread on my own sojourn to temporary expatriatelife in Europe. With these books, he had won the respect of his generationand the admirationof those of us younger and younger. With TheConfessions of Nat Turnerand Sophie'sChoice,he entered the

great spotlight of the AmericanConversationor Shouting Match- on questions of race and history. The scenes of the slave rebellionin the formerburned into readers'minds;the smell of the burning bodies in the exterminationovens in the latterstill lingersin my nostrils. I met him for the first time decades and decades later,long afterthe uproarand debates about whether or not a white southernermight permithimself to take on those dangeroussubjects that some of the commissarsof literature declaredout of bounds for him. I was on a prize jury,and he was speakingat a small dinneron a mellow autumn night in New YorkCity where the winner would accepthis award.Afterward, we walked along Fifth Avenue and talked a little, and- miraculously,without me remind-1 ing him- he asked if I hadn't once written him a letter?That was me, I said. He laughed and threw his armaroundmy shoulderand we kept on walking. He rememberedthat little bleat of mine from my undergraduatedays. I laughed along with him, embarrassedto rememberthe boy I once was.

A Tributeto

William

Styron

(1925-2006) On the few occasions after that when we met, we laughed again aboutit. And afterturning his talentto writing in the book called Darkness Visibleabout the clinical depression from which he had long suffered, Styron in his last published work of fiction turned the light on his own boyhood in A Tidewater Morning:Three Talesfrom Youth,which came out in 1993. In these inward-turning,beautifullyelegiacpages, he demonstratedonce again that good novelists have good memories,and great novelists have greatmemories,becausein the books they leave behind they give to future generationsscenes and storiesand charactersthat will stand as the memoryof us all. To WilliamStyron, late of Styron s Acres, Roxbury, Connecticut. . . thankyou for writing. Washington,D.C. Editorialnote:This piece first aired on November 2, 2006.Formore informationon NationalPublicRadio and its programming- and to listen to Alan Cheuse reading the on-air version of this tribute- visit the NPR website (www.npr.org). Alan Cheuse, "The Voice of Books'"on National Public Radio for nearly twenty-five years, has been sharing his "Off the Air" columns with WLT since 2005. His short fiction has appeared in such publications as the New Yorker,the AntiochReview, and Ploughshares,and he has been a member of the writing faculty at George Mason University in Fairfax,Virginia, since 1987. Copyright © 2006 by Alan Cheuse. Published by arrangementwith the author and National Public Radio.

10 I World Literature Today

liter Whether it deals primarilywith fantasy or with reality,the graphic novel is a form suited to the contemporary age because of its appeal to our newly learned sense that realitycan very quickly become fantasy, and vice versa, as well as its unique and comforting combination of the qualities of both book and screen. I contend that the graphic novel will continue to displace (if never completely replace) purely textual writing and that it will eventually become the most popular form of reading. That is because I think that, fortunately or unfortunately, we will watch realityand fantasy morph into each other many, many times in our collective lives in the years to come, not always pleasantly. The good news is that the graphic novel now offers just as many fine creative talents- and as subtle, plastic, and wonderful a reading experience- as any literarygenre ever has done. -

Stephen E. Tabachnick

Co A

c=J

L=

°

ANDREW D. ARNOLD

debateover comics' qualificationsas art has been crushed,like an icky spider, under a pile of masterfulbooks. Art Spiegelman's Maus, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan:The Smartest Kid on Earth, and

MarjaneSatrapi'sPersepolisare just a few of the ever-growinglist of importantworks of graphicalliteraturethat prove comic art can as much truth, carry beauty,mystery,emotion,and smartentertainmentas any of the other,more traditional,media of expression.Even the IvoryTowerhas admitted "graphic novels'7(an imperfect term that describes any book-length comic work, includingnonfiction)onto course lists. So now we can turn our attentionto more interestingcomparativequestions.Forexample,can comicscreatepoetrylike the works of Shakespeare,T. S. Eliot,or AleksandrPushkin? In short,no, but not from lack of merit or ability.Whilecomics have a similar delivery as poetry- books, paper, words, etc.- the language, syntax, and meaning of comics spring primarilythrough the relationshipbetween images rather than words. This is not just a differentballgamebut a differentsport. However, this does not exclude comics from achievingthe same artisticambitionsas poetry. Practicallysince theirinception,comicshave shown theirabilityto achievepowerful artistrythroughthe inspireduse of condensed,musical,and highly structured language. So, herewith a brief survey of some comic art that rivals the work of many a fine traditionalpoet. Earlyon, during the explosion of newspaperstripsin the early twentiethcentury, creatorshad the rarekind of artisticfreedom that comes from a total lack of rules or precedent.As a result, some of the wildest feats of artisticimaginationin the historyof the medium occurredat its inception.Perhapsno pioneeringcomics

12 I World Literature Today

artistcame as close to poetic perfectionas George Herriman (1880-1944),authorof KrazyKat,which appeared in newspapers from 1913 until the author'sdeath. Like few others,Herrimandeveloped his own "voice"both in his writtenand visual languageto createa work beloved by some of the most highly regarded artists and intellectuals of the time. GilbertSeldes, culturalessayist par excellence,praised it in his now-classic 1924 book The SevenLivelyArtsas "themost amusing and fantasticand satisfactorywork of art produced in Americato-day." Herrimanused the core dynamic of his three prin- lovesick Krazy Kat, brick-throwing cipal characters Ignatz Mouse, and dutiful Offica Pup- like a sonnet form,endlessly riffingon the characters'relationshipsto get at somethingprofoundlytragicand funny about life. One full-page Sunday strip from 1937 exemplifies the many beauties of KrazyKat.Over the course of several panels, Krazy seeks seclusion under a tree and begins writing in a diary.Littleheartsbubbleout of its pages as she does so. She speaks to herself in the oddball patois that is one of the strip's hallmarks."I are alone," she says, "Jetzme . . . an' jetz my dee-dee diary."She puts the diary under a rock and incants over it, "Now beck into sigglution, witch only these kobbil rocks, this blue bin butch-the moon an' the dokk, dokk night know. An' they won't tell-you is illone."The final panel, stretching the width of the page, shows all the other characters readingthe book aftershe has left. In a single page, Herriman creates not a traditionalpoem but its comic-art equivalent. It has playfulness about both the language ("dee dee diary," "dokk, dokk night") and the images (thebackgroundchangesfrompanel to panel though the foregroundremains consistent).It also examines great themes like love (those little hearts) and existentialism ("you is illone").But the essence of the work, called the "gag"panel in this context but akin to a sonnet's final couplet,appearsat the end. Herrimanburststhe illusion of aloneness and privacy,emphasizing our existence in a community. And it's funny, too. Most important,he communicatesthis through a wordless image. Impossible in any other medium, here we see an example of cartoonpoetry in its purest form. The comic-bookcrazethatbegan with the introduction of Supermanin 1938 did about as much harm as good for the medium. While massively popularizingthe comics'language,cheap comic books also commodified it, leading to a stultificationof the form as a mode of personalexpression.It wouldn't begin to develop its full

What Is a Graphic Novel? EDDIECAMPBELL The term graphic novel is currently used in at least four different and mutually exclusive ways. First it is used simply as a synonym for comic books. For instance, I recently read of an "eight-page graphic novel" that I myself once drew. Second, it is used to classify a format - for example, a bound book of comics either in soft- or hardcover - in contrast to the old-fashioned stapled comic magazine. Third, it means, more specifically, a comic-book narrative that is equivalent in form and dimensions to the prose novel. Finally, others employ it to indicate a form that is more than a comic book in the scope of its ambition - indeed, a new medium altogether. It may be added that most of the important "graphic novelists" refuse to use the term under any conditions. In other words, confusion reigns. However, what is clearly observable is that reaching for a new rubric for the medium as it is now practiced coincides with a large shift in aesthetic outlook. The hallmarks of this new position include a respect for the authorial voice, the longing to establish a permanent bookshelf of great works in a popular art that was previously never more than "throwaway," and a deeper sense of the medium's history than previously prevailed. It is my belief that, long before the constituencies of the graphic novel have finished arguing among themselves, the strategies that have been devised for long-range pictorial reading will contribute significantly to an emerging new literature of our times in which word, picture, and typography interact meaningfully and which is in tune with the complexity of modern life with its babble of signs and symbols and stimuli.

March-April 2007 i 13

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware The graphic novel that has set the standard for the genre, ChrisWare's magnum opus follows the comically cruel adventures of a not-very-smart,nolonger-a-kid JimmyCorriganas he searches for his lost father. For more about this title, see page 29.

potential until the 1960s, when a group of West Coast cartoonistsbegan independentlypublishingcomicbooks and selling them "underground"in head shops and record stores. RobertCrumb became the most famous member of this movement. Though he would go on to become comics' most brilliant polytechnic, constantly changingstyles and subjects,his early work remainshis most popularand the closest to what can be called comic poetry. "FreakoutFunnies Presents I'm a Ding Dong Daddy,"a two-pagerthat appearedin the premierissue of Zapin 1967,exemplifiesthe psychedelicizedfree-form style of the undergroundera. Wordless except for the onomatopoeiaof "Snap!""Bonk!"and "Pow!",it depicts a big-footed young man having an epiphany on the street.Ecstatic,his mind blown, he runs around hitting his head against the wall, eventually working himself up into such a cosmic frenzy that he explodes into stars. Capturedin a thoughtbubble,the starsdissolve to emptiness as our man from the beginning returnsto a state of ignorance.Likethe best linguisticpoetry, "DingDong Daddy"uses the comics languageof the past (superhero and gag comics)in radicallynew ways to express something profoundabout the cultureof its time. Thecomicsdidn't begin to emergefrom the "underground" until the 1980s. Raw, a magazine edited by Art Spiegelman and FranchiseMouly, became one of the main factorsin the shift. Emphasizingworks closer

to self-aware "art"than salacious entertainment,Raw asserteditself as comicsfor grown-upsratherthanmerely "adults."Among the many brilliantpieces to have appearedin its pages, RichardMcGuire's"Here"(1989) stands out as one of the most influentialworks of comics poetryever published.Itsmethodof using comicsto split time into multiplelayersthatcanbe readsimultaneously still has the shock of the new. It begins as a pregnant woman stands in her living room and announcesto her husband,"Honey,I thinkit's time."Fixingthe "camera" to the same location,McGuirebegins jumpingback and forth in time by generations,then centuries,then millennia, exploringthe past and futureof a single location in space. He does this in six pages by setting smaller panels inside larger ones, which are all labeled with a year,so one begins to readmultipletimelinessimultaneously, each with its own narrative.Using similaritiesof composition,movement, and language, McGuireties it all togetherinto a fluid comment on the nature of time using a form unique to comics. The youngest comic-book poet of this survey, Anders Nilsen (b. 1973), has been gaining a major reputationamong the comixcenti for his simple, enigmatic,and memorablework. One of his most interesting recentpieces appearedin the excellentbiannualanthology series Mome, published by Fantagraphicsbooks (reprintedhere on pp. 16-23). The fall 2005 issue included

Nilsen's shortwork "Event."Thedesign couldn'tbe simpler. Page 1 contains a single gray square with a black border, the size of a postage stamp, accompanyingthe text, "Whatyou said you would do."On page 2 a slightly smaller squarebroken into quadrantsof differenthues sits over the text "Yourreasonsfor not doing it: stated." Page 3 contains a larger, dun-colored square over the word "Unstated."It continueslike this, using squaresof varying sizes and quantitiesto representtime, people, events, and consequencesaffectedby and resultingfrom this original,unnamed inaction.A comics poem with a twist ending, the last panel switches its core geometry to featurered concentriccircles over the label "Anxiety experiencedevery time you think back to this experience for the rest of your life." While lines like that will not win over any old-schoolpoets, as a whole the work reads as a fascinatinglyclever minimalistvisual poem. The words and pictures are totally dependent on each otherto convey the meaningof the work, which readsas a compressed,playful examinationof regret.In sum, it is a graphicpoem.

2X z
z o >

o

I5 1 o Z>

X \

i o

I

< §

effects, so traditional literature and the book medium in which it exists have found a way to combine their strengths with that of painting, anotherthreatenedmedium in the electronicage, and to meet the screen on its largely visual ground while retaining the pleasures and advantages of the book. Literary books can offer depth, subtlety, privacy, and intimacy. They also offeran experiencecontrolledby the reader,who can open and close a book at any time, unlike the film or TV viewer, who must follow a film or televisionshow more or less continuouslywhile it is being screened and finds interruptionsa disservice. Yet the advantagesof the electronic media are many: presentationsin

the electronic media are relatively concise and offer speed of apprehension, are relatively easy on the eyes compared to print (except for some badly illuminated computer screens), include sound, and can portraysuch things as subtle facial expressions and landscapes better than literaturecan. In the form of video games, they also offer interactivity.Whereasthe graphicnovel cannot include sound, it provides many of the advantages of both print and electronic media while creatinga unique and subtle experience all its own (including strikingly letteredindicationsof sound). Whetherwe're dealing with Watchmen (known as the Ulyssesof the graphic novel for its subtlety, sty-

listic variety, philosophical reach, and depth of characterization,and which is much more approachable than Joyce's Ulysses) or Marjane - a starkand harSatrapi'sPersepolis rowing look into what it was like to grow up underthe Shahof Iranand then Khomeini- the graphic novel gives us the subtlety and intimacy we get from good literary books while providingthe speed of apprehension and the excitingly scrambled, hybrid readingexperiencewe get from watching, say, computer screens that are full of visuals as well as text. The graphic novel also provides something else, as Marshall McLuhannoted long ago and Scott McCloud has since reiterated: imaginative interactivity. Comics for McCloud constitute a Zen-like "invisible art," which makes use of the blank spaces, or gutters,that exist between panels and which are the very definition of the unique comics experience. According to McCloud, the reader must fill in these blanks, thus imagining a good deal of the action that takes place in comics. It follows that the mental interactivity of the reader with a graphicnovel is much more pronounced and essential than that which occurs when he or she watches a film or high-definition television, in which there are ordinarily no blank spaces for a reader to fill in imaginatively. Thus, the graphic novel routinely manages to provide a powerful interactive experience that has something in common with the interactivityof even that most interactivegenre of all, the video game. It is auspicious, indeed, for those who value books and reading that the book has managed to offer this new, hybrid form of reading that combines visual with verbal rhetoric, for the screen is a very

March-April 2007i 25

Natalie Portmanas Evey and Hugo Weaving as V in the futuristic thriller V for Vendetta, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd.

powerful competitor- seeming to threaten, at times, the erasure of reading altogether,except perhaps among those people (usually of an older generation)most devoted to it. Even people like myself, who value traditional reading enormously, often find it more appealing to surf the unique blend of text and picture that is the Internet rather than to read a book when sufferinga spell of insomnia.Video games are hypnotic, to judge from the scores of young people playing them devotedly in shopping malls. Television is actually addictive, as several studies have shown. Films provide a great Friday-nightsocial experience.Therefore,it is no wonder that, owing to the impact of these various visual media, from year to year students display less and less patiencewith unillustrated texts, especiallylong ones; teaching Moby Dick or ParadiseLost is now a

job that takes far more persistence, devotion, and flair to performsuc-

26 I World Literature Today

cessfully than was the case in the past. Even with the best teachers, many students cannot now rise to the challenge of reading pure texts. Because of the influence of the electronic screen, that form of reading is slowly being lost, except for a few specialist readers, much like the amateurplaying of classical piano,which is now a vanishingart. The new hybrid visual and verbal reading- different from traditional reading but fortunately no less subtle, intelligent, or, in its way, demanding- is rapidly taking its place. That is why, I believe, English departments- rather than art or communicationsdepartmentsare leading the movement into the teaching and study of the graphic novel. English departments are book-oriented,studentsare reading pure text much less than they used to, and English departments are trying to find a way to reactto this trend in order to ensure their own survival.

It is only honest to admit that even the most motivated readers, whether they are twenty-five or sixty-five, can become physically exhausted when reading pure text in books and staring at those little black marks on white paper for long periods with no visual relief. A long, unillustratedtext takes a long time to read,and many people don't quite have the stamina or, more importantly,the taste for that anymore. They just don't want to put in the time,no matterhow fascinating the book. They wonder why the writercould not have beenmore concise. They want a quick read ratherthan a thicktext,not because they are unintelligentor lazy, but simply because they are used to quick electronic perception. Also, despite all of the cliches written aboutpurelytextualnovels allowing us to imaginecharactersand places, the truthis that most of us who are not visual artistscannotreallyvisualize what a writer is talking about

2

I I

I

when he or she describesa person or physical object;most of us need to see thatpersonor object,and television and films- and graphicnovels- allow us to do just that. (The factthatgraphicnovels are so easily adaptableto othervisual media also partiallyexplainswhy so many talented artistsand writersare drawn to the genre these days.) At the same time, books as a medium are not going away, just as theater survived films. I- and apparentlya lot of other peoplelike to go to bookstores, to hold books, to flip through them, and even to read them while drinking some coffee. There is something special- call it privacy and intimacy- between ourselves and a book that we are not ready to give up. And then there's the fact that books don't black out on us sometimes,as electronicdevices do. The graphicnovel is the ideal evolution of the book in its attempt to adaptto the new electronicage. I do not mean to imply that text-based books will disappear in the foreseeable future, and even Watchmen includes a substantialpiece of pure (and brilliantlywritten) text at the end of each chapter.Nor do I think that Englishdepartmentsare going to stop teachingMelville or Milton in their original, textual versions anytime soon (although there exist terrificgraphic-noveladaptationsof Eliot's WasteLandby MartinRowson and of Kafka's"Metamorphosis" by Peter Kuper). I think textbased books will exist for a long time to come, but I also think that the balancebetween purely textual books and graphicnovels in terms of numbersof readerswill continue to shift in favor of graphic nov-

els. I also predict that the graphic novel will continue to hold its own against the electronic screen and that, if handheld electronic book readers ever prove themselves (as they have so far failed to do), the graphicnovel will be an extremely popularform of readingin that format as well. Whileall this relatesto the technicalreasonthatthe graphicnovel is becoming prevalent today- namely, a diminution of our ability and desire to read straight text, while we retainour taste for the intimacy of the book and find a combination of text and picture very congenial- there is also one primary cultural reason for the emerging triumph of the graphic novel. It is the reason comics were and still are considered childish by many people. In a child's imagination, the line between the physicallypossible and the physically impossible is blurred,as it is in comics, where a man can leap tall buildings in a single bound and creatures may metamorphoseinto other creatures at will. It is very easy for the artist to make the move from the realistic to the fantastic and vice versa in comics; it can be done from one panel to the next or even within one panel. We accept strange transformations in comics; that is perhaps the very essence of the culturalside of the comics experience, running from Lyonel Feininger'sWeeWillie Winkie'sWorldto Shuster and Siegel's Supermanand beyond. (That is why we are able to accept Peter Kuper's superb rendering of Kafka's bug/human character,Gregor Samsa, in Kuper's adaptation of "The Metamorphosis,"so readily.) In short, I feel that the cultural

reason that serious comics seem to appeal to so many readers today is that we are living in a world in which our reality might instantly prove, and often does prove, to be completely differentfrom what we thoughtit was. I happened to be teaching Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta,which ends with the Houses of Parliamentbeing blown up, at the University of Oklahoma around the time when the Alfred P. Murrahbuilding was destroyed by a truckbomb about fifteenmiles north of my classroom.I remember the class and I remarkingthat we were now living in a comic-book world. And many of us have been teaching Watchmen,which details a catastrophicattackon New York City, before and since 9/11. Again, we are living in a comic-book world- that is, a world that seems to partake of the elastic landscape of a comicbook,so readyto explode from mundane realism into a fantasticshape in a second. Mooreand as Gibbons,who created Watchmen that vera serial in 1987-88,prove bal and visual poets can indeed be seers,as the Romansbelieved.(And in a particularlybrilliant observation based on William Burroughs's "cut-up"collage technique,Moore shamanisticallyimplies in chapter 11 that, for the reader, the panels itself are and gutters of Watchmen comparableto the multipletelevision screens that Veidt watches simultaneouslyin orderto discernthe shape of the future,thus turningthe reader into a seer as well.) The world has caught up with Mooreand Gibbonsand has become as outlandish as the virtual world they describe.Moore'sfantasticplot

March-April 2007 1TJ

in Watchmen, in particular,and its elastic renderingin comics seem to duplicateour own explosiveexperience betterthan any other medium does. No wonder Art Spiegelman found it so possible to render his personal9/11 experiencein a graphic novel, In the Shadowof No Towers,or

that Sid Jacobsonand Ernie Colon have just turned the 9/11 commission reportinto a graphicnovel, The Illustrated 9/11 Commission Report.

Theelasticityof comicsmakesJacobson and Colon's adaptation more apt,moresuitedto our sense of how "unreal"the Twin Towers events were,thanthe 9/11 reportitself.And theiradaptationhas a diagrammatic quality that makes these fantastic events easier to read about and to understandthan might be possible in prose alone. A comic-book-like incident, planes deliberatelyflying into the Twin Towers,has actually becomea comicbook.Thenew comic book makes 9/11 no more or less "real"than it was; it just fits those eventsnaturally,or so it seems. But the comic-booknovel is of our times not only becausemany of today'seventsaretruly"fantastic" that is, horrificand unexpected.The elasticity of the comic-booknovel also allows it to bringout the fantastic element inherent- but not often noticed- in mundane reality. One of my (and many of my students7) favoritegraphicnovels is Raymond Briggs'sEthelandErnest.Briggsis one of the premiercontemporaryBritish illustratedchildren'sbook creators. His Father Christmasand The Snow-

manhave sold many,manycopiesto parentseager to show and tell these

28 I World Literature Today

illustratedstories to their children. Etheland Ernestis a serious, subtle, and gentle biographyof his parents and also an accountof Britishhistory fromcirca1930(whentheyweremarried)to 1971,the year in which both died. We watch as Etheland Ernest move through a life made difficult by the Depressionand the Blitzand to them thenmadeincomprehensible after World social change by rapid War II. Despite this seriousnessof subject and purpose, however, the charactersare rendered in gentle, slightly blurredand dreamy colors. Theproseis simple,relativelysparse, and limited to dialogue. The word balloons swell from small, smooth, and regular to jagged, large, and full of emphasis.The world of Ethel and Ernest,renderednostalgicallyby theirson despiteits manydifficulties, becomesa fairy-talelandscapeinhabitedby a noble(ifsometimessilly and ignorant)queen and king, although Briggs never directly refers to his parentsas such.He has takenhis and his parents'mundaneand sometimes not-so-mundanerealityand brought out all of its inherentmagic,thus collapsingtheboundarybetweenreality and fantasy.In short, Briggs'sbook is reallya children'sbook for adults, and his intentionseemsto be to comfortus, justas childrenarecomforted by a gentlytold tale. Whetherit deals primarilywith fantasy or with reality,the graphic novel is a formsuitedto the contemporaryage because of its appeal to our newly learned sense that reality can very quicklybecomefantasy, and vice versa,as well as its unique and comfortingcombinationof the

The comic-book novel is of our times not only becausemany of today'sevents are truly "fantastic*that is, horrific and unexpected.The elasticity of the comic-book novel also allows it to bring out the fantastic element inherent - but not often noticed - in mundanereality. qualities of both book and screen. If we add the enormouspopularity of Japanesemanga with American preteens,as well as the remembered comfort inherent in the illustrated children'sbooks with which we are all familiar,to the present impetus toward reading sophisticatedcomics, I contend that the graphicnovel will continue to displace (if never completely replace) purely textual writing and that it will eventually become the most popular form of reading. That is because I think that, fortunately or unfortunately, we will watch reality and fantasy morph into each other many, many times in our collective lives in the years to come, not always pleasantly. The good news is that the graphic novel now offers just as many fine creative talents- and as subtle, plastic, and wonderful a readingexperience- as any literary genre ever has done. Universityof Memphis

ANDREWD. ARNOLD

Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes A monumental work of historicalfiction focusing on Weimar-era Berlin,Lutes's projected three-volume series is already ten years in the making and only half done. This first volume, which reads as a complete story, focuses on the intersecting lives of an American art student and a jaded, leftwing newspaper reporter. Taking its visual style from the detail of European comics, the finished series will be one of the major graphic works of the past twenty years. Buddha, by Osama Tezuka Comics made in Japan are called manga, and the principalcreator of their indigenous style is Tezuka (1928-89). Famous in the United States for Astro Boy, the prolificTezuka also created this eight-volume, highly fictionalized biography of the great spiritualleader. As profane as it is pro-

cross-cutting technique, marks Clowes's most sophisticated use of the form yet.

to the central Buddhisttheme: all life is sacred.

The graphic novel that has set the standard for

sappy story to create a masterwork of comic art. The black-and-white drawings marrythe real with the spiritual- at one point the epilepsy is depicted as a snakelike demon, contorting its victim- to create a work that explores history, human relationships, and the meaning of art.

z

latest graphic novel, focusing on the intermingled lives of a warped suburbia using an Altmanesque

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware

oir of growing up with an older brother who suffers from epilepsy transcends a potentially

I

to be one of comics' most acidic creators. This

found, with a surprisingamount of humor for a "religious"book, Tezuka nevertheless stays true

Epileptic, by David B. Originallypublished in France, David B.'s mem-

o

Ice Haven, by Daniel Clowes While gaining a reputation for writing tart, independent screenplays {Ghost World,Art School Confidential), here's hoping Clowes will continue

the genre, ChrisWare's magnum opus follows the comically cruel adventures of a not-verysmart, no-longer-a-kid Jimmy Corriganas he searches for his lost father. Though it requires a very high level of comics reading skill, it rewards the reader with some of the most inventive uses of the form yet seen. Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District, by Ben Katchor Originallyappearing in weekly alternative newspapers, this collection of strips captures the ineffable qualities of urban living. Katchorcreates a world that never was, but should have been, of street-side mustard dispensers, radiator musicians, and misspent youth centers. One cannot help but be enchanted by the false nostalgia of these brief comic poems.

8

March-April 2007 i 29

The Robert Crumb Handbook, by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski An artist working at his craft for over forty years, Robert Crumb's contribution to comics and popular culture cannot be overstated. This book, a collaborative effort that includes Crumb's oral history of his career and artistry,works as the most succinct overview of the master's significant oeuvre. Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco The comics' version of Edward R. Murrow, Louis Riel, by Chester Brown Chester Brown, one of several important comics makers from Canada, takes on one of his country's unique heroes in this major work of slightly fictionalized history. Riel, a revolutionaryand

intifada in Palestine, his second book, Safe Area Gorazde, brought him to the Balkansduring the 1990s. Collecting the oral histories of those who made it through the siege of Gorazde, Sacco

mystic of the nineteenth century, led the French/ Indian population of what became Saskatchewan

visualizes the events that would otherwise have

in a failed demand for sovereignty. Working with

lived only in people's memories.

themes of madness, religious ecstasy, and the corruption of power, Brown balances this serious work of intense research by drawing in a style reminiscent of newspaper gag strips. Maus, volumes 1-2, by Art Spiegelman Arguably the most import work of graphic literature ever written, the PulitzerPrize-winning Maus books launched the form into the rarefied air of

Adventures of Tintin, by Herge LikeJapan's Osamu Tezuka, the influence of Herge on Europe'scomic style cannot be overestimated. Originallypublished in Belgium and France,the adventures of Tintin,a globetrotting "reporter,"and his dog, Snowy, have been translated into every major language and continue to enchant children and adults with their wonderful

academics and historians. A masterful work of Holocaust biography- the author illustrateshis

characters and detailed graphics.

father's story of survival- it's the one work of

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud The only truly successful book-length comics essay, McCloud's deeply influential 1993 book

graphic literaturethat everybody knows, and its reputation is well deserved. One! Hundred! Demons!, by Lynda Barry A longtime weekly strip artist ("ErniePook's Comeek"), Barrycreated this book as an amalgam of childhood memoir with outright fiction. Told as a series of vignettes, Barryhas an uncanny total recall of what it was like to be an adolescent. Everyconfusing, awkward, and infuriating moment has been illustratedin caustically funny ways. Persepolis I, by Marjane Satrapi The first of a projected three-volume series (the second has already been released) recounts the author's life as child in Tehran during the early years of the Ayatollah's revolution. With simple graphics and a compelling narrative,it pulls back the veil on a world seldom seen and even less understood.

30 I WorldLiteratureToday

Sacco specializes in reportorialnonfiction from the world's war zones. After covering the first

provided the world with a real vocabularyto discuss the medium as an intellectual pursuit. Brilliantlywritten in comics style for even the most novice comics reader, this book remains invaluable for anyone interested in the mechanics of the language of comics- or who just wants to better understand what makes them so special. Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Strictlya writer, Moore straddles the line between "artistic"and "commercial"comics better than any other creator in the medium. Author of From Hell and League of ExtraordinaryGentlemen, Moore's Watchmen, aided by the brilliant artwork of fellow BritDave Gibbons, deconstructs

I i

the superhero for an audience that includes more than geeks.

I

Artist

Profile

Jessica Abel

t

I

I
darkviesSj

Smoldering

down. "The.mice, from irhe "\o^>

huddled a+ -Vhebo4to»Y)/Scurried -Hqe bag Across a shorn -field. I s+ood ov^r 1+

46 I World Literature Today

graphic literature

& as irhe burning ^e^cl^^d each carbon letter erf what you'd Writf&n

Vike 3 sona MJ

pi

z uu

D UJ

H >J

Q

O

MiriamKatin.We Are On Our Own: A Memoir. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2006. 122 + 7 unnumbered pages, ill. Can$24.95/US$19.95. isbn 1-896597-20-3

For many who were reared on flimsy, newsprint comic books as a means to while away rainy Saturdayafternoons,the appearanceof Art Spiegelman'sMaus I a little over twenty years ago was a revelation.In the years since, and especially recently, many sophisticated and literary graphic novels have been published, and with WeAre On OurOwn,her first work, MiriamKatinhas entered the top tier of graphicnovelists. SubtitledA Memoir,Katin'sstirringwork deftly goes to the heart of one family's Holocaust experience,and yet along the way this becomes a universal tale of parenthood,persecution,loss, and redemption.Set in Budapestand the Hungariancountryside,the storybegins in 1944when the Jewishpopulation of Hungarywas being denied simple rights,such as owning a dog. As the tale of the fleeing motherand child unfolds, Katin'selegant and nuanced gray drawings evoke both children's-bookillustrationsand fineartdrawings.She expertlyestablishesnarrativethroughsimple panels and then swiftly moves it along or creates energyby breakingout of the frame;in so doing, she indicatesthe precariousnessof orderin our lives. The story of Lisa and her mother,Esther,who risks everything to save herself and her child while her husbandis at war, follows a path known to many familiarwith Holocausttales:escape, concealment,impoverishment,violence,and, luckily,some few kindnessesalong the way. Everysuch story is the same yet singular, and Katin'scharactersare emphaticallywell drawn, in both meaningsof the word. As she raises a major issue for survivorsand their children- can faith in God survive such an ordeal?- she also createsa poignant mother-daughterrelationshipin the face of almostindescribablehardshipand travail.And since such ordeals do not fade frommemoryeven with happy endings, Katinbringsthe readerinto the vibrantpresentby using color to illustratethe mostly serene adult circumstancesof Lisawith her own child. The glory of the graphicnovel lies with its ability to move quicklyvia image and to provide irony and commentwithout language.Katinexcels at these juxtapositions.Forexample,at one point Estherand Lisaare racingthroughthe night in frigid,snowy weather,strugglingto stay togetherand to save theirlives. Thisharrowing gray page is set adjacentto a blaze of autumnalpanels where the adult Lisa and her child are playing at hide and seek. Lisa'spast haunts every such moment. WeAre On Our Ownprovides great satisfactionboth visually and emotionally,as it beckons the reader back for anotherand then anotherlook. What is even more gratifyingis that every reexaminationprovides new pleasures. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University

66

enlarged on, Tyler here touches on a kind of social imperialismborn out of good intentions. A subtheme emerges in the sense that even American families can feel the need to dig to the America as it is representedin the popular media. This comes up in the novel throughthe children'sfeeling that no matter what their parents had done, they hadn't had a fully significantChristmas,as definedby those televisionfamilies. Ultimately, Digging to America

concludes quite satisfactorily for the reader who has entered Anne Tyler's world. It is a world where people are valued, where affection and even joy can arrive unexpectedly. Those readerswill both sense and even hope that such a world is more real than the nightly news. W. M. Hagen OklahomaBaptist University

Abdourahman A. Waberi. Aux EtatsUnis d'Afrique. Paris.J. C. Lattes. 2006. 233 pages. €15. isbn2-7096-2813-9

In Aux Etats-Unis d'Afrique, his

sixth work of fiction, Djiboutian author AbdourahmanWaberi creates a farcicalworld in which Africa is rich and prosperous, attracting many immigrantsfrom Europeand America- continentsdevastatedby war and disease. Waberi humorously invents an Africa to which many Western accomplishments, inventions,and productsare attributed. The first man on the moon was EzraMapanza,a majorfilm is A Vestde Bangui(with a JamesDean (the Maputomuseclone),MAAMM um of Africanart in Mozambique) is compared to the Grand Palais; consumers can buy Nka furnishings, McDiop burgers, Neguscafe, and HadjaDaas ice cream.

The novel resembles an eighteenth-century philosophical tale, with its epigraphsintroducingeach chapter,its emphasison themesand settingsratherthanplot and character, its satiricnarrativevoice. Maya, a poor child fromNormandy,saved from destitution by Docteur Papa, a humanitarian aid worker from Eritrea,is only graduallyawarethat she does not look like her African playmates. After she becomes an artist,she decides to visit her native land, where she is shocked by the poverty and crime and amused by the inconsistencies of the French language. She also becomes more awareof the miserableconditionsof the Europeanimmigrantsin Africa. Thenarratordescribeshis compatriots' scorn of the tribal enmities between Flemishand Walloons in Belgium and of the retrograde religionsin Europe- Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. There are many instancesof how Western commentarieson African tribalism and animism could be reversed. The reversalof Africaand the West serves to disorient the reader (presumably, as with most African literaturepublishedin France,a European or Americanreader),making one aware of the stereotypesWesterners accept when thinking about othercultures. Waberi's Africa is no better than the West. Its intellectualsare too proud,consumerismis rampant, emigrants are treated much as the West has treatedAfricans.Satirically imitating the policies of Nicolas Sarkozy,the Frenchministerof the interior, a television commentator talksaboutconductingemigrantsto the borders:"D'abordillegaux,puis semi-legaux, enfin para-legaux et ainsi de suite." Worse, one official puts two Europeanprisonersin an

enclosure, promising freedom to the one who kills the other! AbdourahmanWaberi'stheme is the need for all peoples to overcome "communalism,"the pride in belonging to any group (racial, religious, or regional)that leads to hatred of others. The novel ends with the hope thatthroughart,literature, and love, the divisiveness of humankindcan be reduced, a goal to which Aux Etats-Unis d'Afrique,

through its clever satiric treatment of ethnicstereotypes,contributes. Adele King Fans Zoe Wicomb. Playing in the Light. New York. New Press (W.W. Norton, distr.). 2006. 218 pages. $24.95. isbn 1-59558-047-6

"I hate traveling," Claude LeviStrauss quips at the beginning of Tristestropiques.MarionCampbell, owner of MCTraveland the focus of Zoe Wicomb'sthird novel, doesn't like to travel, either. Only when she leaves her office in Cape Town, though, and her luxury flat on the sea facing RobbenIsland, does she discoversomethingaboutthe South Africain which she lives. Playing in the Light isn't unique

in representing the descent into one's past, and one's self, by the metaphor of travel. Marion steps into her past by motoring to Wuppertal,and she experiencesan intuitive glimpse into the future of the "New South Africa"at the novel's end after returningfrom a solitary journeyto Europe. Besides directing a successful travel agency, Marioncares for her aging Afrikaans father, John, who has troubleboth walking and urinating. In his early thirties, he migratedto CapeTown froma farm in the Karoo,but he never adjusted

MARCH - APRIL 2007

67

LU > LU

Pi

2 LU

LU

H Q

O

to urbanlife. He was a "trafficcop" and, being a raw recruit, didn't contradicthis superior,who wrote "Kempel"when John gave his last name. The title of Wicomb's novel could have been PlayingWhite.That is the shocking truth Marionlearns about the conduct of her defunct mother, Helen. Traveling with young Brenda Mackay, who lives in Bonteheuweland is the only colored employee on her staff,Marion learns, during a Ulysses-like recognition scene in Wuppertal, that her mother only allowed Marion's grandmother, called "Tokkie,"to visit their house once a week. To prevent neighbors from identifying her dark-skinnedmother,Helen had her enter through the back door.Marion'sshockat havingbeen brought up white and discovering she's colored, her personal parallel to the historicalverities uncovered by the TRC,cause Marion swollen feet- her mother suffered from a foot ailment, too- and scream-ridden nightmares. Marion's discomfort at what her companion,Geoff Geldenhuys, might think pushes her to distance herself from him, and to consider selling MCTravel.Ultimately, she decides to go to Europe alone and has Brendarun the company.Traveling, she realizes she betrayedher childhood friend, Annie Boshoff, when she was eight years old, because Mr. Boshoff, a "playwhite," had wanted to be reclassified as colored.In Scotland,elderly Dougie, a man of modest means, gives her a tartanfor her seemingly Scottishfather. Marion's re-entranceinto the new South Africawas auspiciously inaugurated at the airport when a man pushing a luggage buggy

quickly picked Geoff's lock, allowing him to retrieve the keys he'd accidentally left dangling inside. Disdainfully,the man accepted the ten-rand tip Marion offered. Her returnwas celebratedby a surprise party. The party- its blended company and harmonious humorrepresents Wicomb's vision of the "New South Africa."Successful at running the company, Brendahad not taken up with Geoff as Marion suspected. Brenda's mother, with whom Brenda lives in the same room although no longer on the same mattress,prepareslocal delicacies. The barbarities uncovered by the TRCseem passe as Marion, Brenda, her mother, Geoff, John, John's sister, and Marion's Afrikaaner office staff sit around telling jokes and making no more reference to the country's going to the dogs: "Woof,woof," as Brenda would say. Biko is not mentioned. Mandela is praised once at the housewarming party. In the spirit of reconciliation, Marion decides to get a new place and move in with her fast-declining father.1Such is Zoe Wicomb'svision of the "New South Africa." Blowing in off the Cape of Good Hope, her novel is a fresh wind in the world of fiction. RobertH. McCormick FranklinCollege,Switzerland Yang Guija. Strength from Sorrow. Youngju Ryu, tr. Merrick, New York. Cross-Cultural Communications. 2005. 223 pages. $25. isbn0-89304-740-6

Reflecting on the many novels and short-story collections by Korean writers I have read over the past two decades, I am struck by the number of works that fall into the categoryof "scarliterature."Characters suffer,endure, survive, but the

Yang Guija wounds never heal. Strengthfrom Sorrow,by Yang Guija,adds to the body of works in this category. Fromwhere do the wounds come? From the annexation of Korea in 1910 by the Japanese,World War II (when Koreabecame part of the Japanesewar machine),the Korean War, which divided a country and families, rapid modernizationand a breakdown of tradition, a ruthless dictator followed by an even more ruthless one, which gave rise to rebellion,suppression,and more rebellion.The stories in this recent collection have their roots in all these events. The strongestand most hauntare three linked tales: stories ing "MountainFlowers,""TheRoad to CheonmaTomb,"and "An Opportunist."The narratorreflectson the life of his father,who workedforthe Japanese,lost his land in the North, and with the loss, his will to live. During the 1980s, the son is taken in by the police and tortured.He signs an oath never to reveal what has happened to him, and thus he broods over his misfortune.Much later, long after his release, when he is on an outing with his family, he runs into one of his torturers.He is forced to exchange pleasantries (continued on page 71)

68

< I o

I

Marjane Satrapl. Chicken with Plums. Anjali Singh, tr. New York. Pantheon. 2006. 84 pages, ill. $16.95. isbn 0-37542415-6

MarjaneSatrapiis most famous for her two-partautobiTheStoryofa Childhood (2003) ographicalwork,Persepolis: and Persepolis II:TheStoryofa Return(2004).She followed books with the less up the criticallyacclaimedPersepolis well-receivedEmbroideries (2005),the title of which refers to genital reconstructivesurgery, a practice in vogue among a sexually active female populationin a culture that stronglydiscouragespremaritalsex. and Chickenwith Plums do Although Embroideries not focus on Satrapi'salterego, Marji,Satrapidoes insert her in the texts as an observer.In Embroideries, an adult Marjilistens as her mother,her grandmother,and their friends exchange confidencesabout their own and others' sexual exploits;in Chickenwith Plums,she makes a cameo appearancein the middle of the story. Satrapi's work thus has a self-referentialquality as each text discloses anotherpiece of her familyhistory. ChickenwithPlumsshareswith Persepolis an effective of and strategy blending private public history, a common featureof postcolonialtexts. While in the Persepolis books the Iranianrevolutionprovides the political and historicalcontext, Chickenwith Plumshearkensback to another crucial time in Iranianhistory: the 1953 CIAbacked coup d'etat that overthrew the government of PrimeMinisterMohammadMossadeghand thwartedits effortsto nationalizeIranianoil. This key moment in Iranianhistory is one of the oft-citedreasonsfor the deep-seated hostility of many Iranianstoward the U.S. government.The story of ChickenwithPlumsunfolds in 1958during a time of generalpolitical disillusionmentin Iran.While the despondentpolitical scene serves as backdrop,the story's main focus is the life and eventualsuicide of Satrapi'sgreat-uncle,musicianNasser Ali Khan. Thebook is divided into nine sections.The firstoffersa quicksynopsis of Nasser Ali Khan'slast few monthsalive. We see him embarkon a quest to replacehis beloved Tar(an Iranianstring instrument),which his wife breaksduring a bitterargument.Unable to find a satisfactorysubstitute,he locks himself in his room, lies on his bed, and prepares to die. The rest of the story consists of a breakdownof each day before his death. One of the narrativestyles Satrapi employs in this text is an effective flashbackand flash-forwardtechniquethrough multiple perspectivesas the same story is told by differentcharacterswith varying results. One of the most strikingpanels is the full-pageillustrationof Nasser Ali Khan'sgravesite;the captionreads:"All those who had known him were present on that day." This panel appearsat the end of the first section and is reproduced at the end of the book, but with a difference.At the end of the first chapter,we see a gatheringof people at the gravesite,their faces mournful,with the exception of one woman whose face is covered with a handkerchief.At the end of the book, all the figures- and their faces- are shaded black except for the woman whose face was previously coveredby a handkerchief.This time she stands out since hers is the only visible face, and she is weeping. In the story that unfolds between these two panels, we discover that she is Irane,Nasser Ali's great love. Her fatherforbadeher from marryinga musician,so he poured his love for her into his beloved Tar,the very same Tarthat his wife would eventuallybreak. In ChickenwithPlums,MarjaneSatrapiweaves togethermultipleperspectivesand competingnarrativesto present a powerfullynuancedstory aboutpassion, idealism, and disillusionmentin love, art,and politics. NimaNaghibi RyersonUniversity

MARCH - APRIL 2007

69

> Anders Brekhus Nilsen. Monologues for the Coming Plague. Seattle, Washington. Fantagraphics (Turnaround, distr.). 2006. 260 pages, ill. $18.95. isbn 1-56097-718-3

Monologues for the ComingPlague begins with the line,

"Could you please slip into something more comfortable?"and ends with, "David:Yeah.I can relateto that/' In between those two lines are several vignettes- some featuringan old woman and a pigeon conversing,others with a man with a scribbledline for a head- that cover such topics as semiotics, Oprah, terrorism,the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and Tide laundry detergent. Sure,the topics seem randomand incoherent,but, as the checkliston the back cover explains,this graphic novel belongs to the genre of absurdistart comics (think Samuel Beckettand Andre Bretonmeet CharlesSchulz and Art Spiegelman).

w H Q ,-j

c^

0

The art in Monologues for the Coming Plague is a

"I've always worked in sketchbooks, but I had lost the habit and my way of working had become very slow and deliberate. While waiting in the airport ... I found myself absorbed in a series of one-panel gags about a woman feeding a bird, brainstorming captions and watching ideas follow/'

departurein style from Anders BrekhusNilsen's previous work, the award-winningDogsand Water(2005).As he has said, "I've always worked in sketchbooks,but I had lost the habit and my way of working had become very slow and deliberate.While waiting in the airport ... I found myself absorbedin a series of one-panelgags about a woman feeding a bird, brainstormingcaptions and watching ideas follow/' This would explain why much of the art in the book is drawn as if the artisthad just enough time for a quick draft in his sketchbookor, as the back cover once again offers,stream-of-consciousness image generation.The book is split into two paper stocks- the first is a heavy, gray stock, the other is a regularwhite stock- to support the theme of drawings from a sketchbook. The combinationof absurdistskits and surrealistart makes Monologuesfor the Coming Plague a difficult book

to understandfor a readerwhose only experiencewith comics might be from the childhood treasuresof Action Comics, The Amazing Spiderman, or even the Pulitzer

Prize-winning graphicnovel Maus,but, as with Beckett and Breton,Nilsen's graphicnovel offers funny and, at times, poignant insights into politics, religion, and pop culture. Monologues for the Coming Plague achieves a

wondrous thing:throughabsurdcomics involving talking dogs, flying men, and a brief appearancefrom the twelve-memberMexicanmusical group Los Angeles de Charly,Anders BrekhusNilsen points out the absurdities in life that often don't make sense until viewed from a distortedfun-housemirror. ArmandoCelayo University of Oklahoma

70

in orderto demonstratethat he has complied with his oath of secrecy. He asks himself, "Can there be a new beginning for me? Can I start " again? The reader is left without an answer. These three stories make Strengthfrom Sorrow a very strong collection. Bonnie R. Crown InternationalLiterature& Arts Program,New YorkCity

VERSE Andres Ehin. Moose Beetle Swallow. PatrickCotter with Taavi Tatsi, trs. Cork, Ireland. Southword. 2005 (released 2006). 64 pages, isbn 1-905002-13-0

To judgefromthe text on the book's cover, one might think that Andres Ehin (b. 1940), a noted contemporary Estonian poet has previously publishedat least five collectionsof poetry in English.Alas, such is not the case. Ehin has, indeed, been a very prolificpoet, but all his books prior to Moose Beetle Swallow have

been published in Estonia, in his native Estonian.Most poets of the vast eastern part of Europe still remainquite unknown in the West. PatrickCotter,a poet himself, advocates in his foreword the type of translationhe has applied for the text. It means creating poetic versions in the target language- not necessarily having knowledge of the originallanguage but just relying on prose translationsmade by someone else. In the present volume, intermediate prose translations have been preparedby Taavi Tatsi.In the final part of the book, a cycle of haikushave been translated directlyby the poet himself. Indeed, this approachworks. Cotter'spoetic versions read quite well and are,at the same time,nota-

bly close to the original Estonian texts. His task has been facilitated by the fact that Ehin has written the greater part of his poetry in a rhymelessfree verse. A related question is to what extent the present selection allows the English reader to grasp the essence of Ehin'spoetry.MooseBeetle Swallowdoes not coincide even roughly with any of Ehin'soriginal collections in Estonian.It does not provide any data as to when the poems were originallypublished. Out of a total of some fifty poems in the English selection, about fifteenbelong to Ehin'slatest verse collection in Estonian,Palutederja mutrikorjaja(2004; Heath cock

and collector of female screws), while the rest have been picked up from earlier published appearances. Moose Beetle Swallow is thus

an anthologyconsciouslydevoid of chronology. I am afraidEhin'ssurrealismin the collection'sinitialsectionwould make little sense to a foreignreader. The opening poem, "deep, below ground/' comparing f Estonians and Cherokees,bears some resemblance to Jaan Kaplinski'spoetry. However, Ehin lacks Kaplinski's fundamentalism in searching for humanity's obscure harmonious origins in life's totality. I would rather advise a foreign reader to start reading the book toward the back, where Ehin says that "poetry is not a sign / poetry is lunatic nocturnal somnambulism"(p. 56). After that, it would be worthwhile to read carefullya long poem originally written in 1966, "Dusk in the Snowfields." The essential Ehin is there. Playful, humoristic, ironic, chaotic, capable of bright sudden metaphors, responding to life's absurditywith an absurdpalette of images and language, despising all

"officialdom"and everything definite, sometimes grotesque, sometimes too light, but still someone who knows in his depths, to quote one of his haikus, that "Theviolin of autumn- / a tree leafless from sadness / chimes frailly." Jiiri Talvet University of Tartu Abdellatif Laabi. Ecris la vie. Paris. La Difference. 2005. 157 pages. €15. isbn 2-7291-1576-5

Moroccan writer Abdellatif Laabi first came into prominencethrough his work with Souffles,an avantgarde journal he founded in 1966. His commitmentto the journaldedicated to cultural and intellectual renewalin the Maghrebearnedhim a prison stint from 1972 to 1980 and an eventual exile in Francein 1985. Ecris la vie is the latest in a long line of socially conscious literary endeavorsby this indefatigable activist, poet, novelist, raconteur, epistolarian, playwright, essayist, translator,and self-dubbed "fanatique de notre Espece." Ecrisla vie is a daring castigation of the caretakersof the industry of evil, those Laabi refers to as possessing "les technologiesdes satans abhorres." Expressing his dream of "discoveringthe source of evil" (decouvrir la source du mal), the poet asserts that the only journey worth undertaking is the one to the center of humanity. In true humanistic spirit, this voyage into the center of humankind is not simply to discover the origins of evil but mainly to restore to humanityits dignity,which is being constantlydesecratedby purveyors of hate (whetherindividuals,terrorist groups, or entire governments). Whetherhe is pleading the cause of the "excludedthirdof humanity"or denouncing the senseless violence

MARCH - APRIL 2007

71

> Pi

2 UJ

Pi < w H Q O

unleashedupon the privilegedfirst, Laabi'slove for humankindknows no bounds, harborsno discrimination. People,in spite of theirmyriad differences, are united in Laabi's workby a sharedhope and need for love, liberty,and dignity. The collection is divided into ten sections of varying lengths. While all the sections deal with the same generaltopic of evil in all its spatial-temporalmanifestations, four of them touch more specifically on some concrete contemporary manifestationsof evil. These are: "Loinde Bagdad"(on the U.S. invasion of Iraq),"Gensde Madrid, Pardon" (on the March 2004 Madrid train bombings), "La terre s'ouvre et t'acccueille"(in memory of TaharDjaout,the Algerianjournalist and writer assassinated in 1993by the fundamentalistArmed Islamic Group), "Lettrea Florence Aubenas"(FlorenceAubenasbeing the Frenchcorrespondentthat was kidnappedand held for 157 days in 2005in Baghdad).Catalogingthese and other monstrous acts, Laabi never ceases to exhort readers to action and to remind them that the battle for life and freedom is a constantone. Ecris la vie is a joy to read, even when its subjectmatteris not particularlyjoyful. A highly oral and lyrical style lends a powerful and lively cadence to the poems. With the exception of a handful, the poems are largely devoid of punctuation.This,in additionto the nature of the free verse used, further underscoresAbdellatifLaabi's refusal to be constrainedby blind adherenceto any particularliterary registeror ideology. MohamedKamara Washington& Lee University

72

Sara Pujol Russell. The Poetry of Sara Pujol Russell. Noel Valis, tr. & intro. Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Susquehanna University Press (Associated University Presses, distr.). 2005. 123 pages. $34.50. isbn 1-57591-099-3

This selection of poemsby the contemporaryCatalanpoet Sara Pujol Russell was translatedinto English by Noel Valis, a scholarknown for her contributionsto modern Spanish literary and cultural studies, including her recent, award-winning volume The Culture of Cursileria: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class

in ModernSpain.For this bilingual anthology, Valis selected poems from PujolRussell'sbooks in Spanish, Elfuego tiendesu aire (1999) and Intacto asombroen la luz del silencio / El silencio del loto, la luz de las rosas

(2001), and some of these poems were originally written in Catalan. In addition, there are five selections from the poet's most recent work, Para decir si a la carencia, si a la naranja, al azafrdn en el pan

(2004).The purpose of this anthology is to introduce Pujol Russell's unique poetry to English-speaking readers- it has been translated to French, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Chinese,and Italian. PujolRussell's"highlyconceptualized, metaphysical"verse has been called a poetry of contemplation by Birute Ciplijauskaite.It is intimate yet strange, humorous, and perplexing;it is ambiguousand subversive in its self-referentiality. Valis notes one characteristicof this poetry is that it "attemptsto erase ... or alter, the fundamentaldistinction between language and the real, or being." As a consequence, in PujolRussell'spoetic world even the reader's usual point of reference- the poetic voice or the "I" that speaks- is unstable: "I begin where the word begins,"writes the

poet, underscoringthe complexity and the unnaturalizedrelationship between the self, the word, and the world. However, there is a world behind these seemingly disconnected signs, for Pujol Russell's imagery is highly traditionaleven if the poet's use of language is not; and the self, its relationto the world,and its relationto othersare characteristic legacies of romanticism.Indeed, this is verse that contemplateslife through the word, that mediates life, thought, sensations, emotions, and desiresthroughthe creativeuse of language, wresting abstractconcepts into intimatevivencias.Of the abstractword, PujolRussellwrites: "I know the world through you and through you I live it. / I live when you give me life, I am saved when you save me." This is poetry that celebrates, at times, the fullness of the moment, of being one with one's place in a given point in time, recalling the early poetry of Jorge Guillen that proclaimsa joie de vivre in the seemingly inconsequential. Pujol Russell's verse also rehearseslife's heartfeltlosses. Forthe bilingualreader,poetry in translationfrequently seems an odd couplingof the foreignwith the familiar; however, Pujol Russell's poetry, written in long lines of free verse with frequent enjambment, appearsparagraphlikeon the page; and since rhyme and meter are not elements of the original verse, the translationinto Englishworks well. Noel Valis has provided a compelling introductionwith an essential selected bibliography,and this first anthology of Sara Pujol Russell's poetry in Englishshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in originaland intriguingnew poetry from Spain. BruceA. Boggs University of Oklahoma

Milan Rufus. And That's the Truth / A to je pravda. Milan Richter & David L. Cooper, eds. Ewald Osers and Viera & James Sutherland-Smith, trs. Koloman Sokol, ill. Wauchonda, Illinois. Bolchazy-Carducci. 2006. 146 pages. $25. isbn0-86516-509-2

The translators7 preface to And That's the Truth notes recurring images of bread and water, with sacramental overtones, in Milan Rufus's poetry, but perhaps more striking- in part because of Koloman Sokol's drawings of sculptors and their work- is the emphasis on stone. In "Rodin'sLovers/' love is the chisel, and in "What Is A poem?" the answer is that "the poem is greater than the word" because it is "Not a stone. A statue. Lot's wife. / that's a poem." In "Carpenters,"the task is "to hack throughinto beauty." Throughout the collection, selected from twenty volumes of his ceuvre, Rufus emphasizes the struggle not only with artisticcreation but with destiny. Like some Englishmodernists,he feels that,in literatureas in life, "all roads lead to silence."A path thatonce seemed to lead to God now "leads to the unknown." Suffering, as inexplicable as that in the poetry of ThomasHardy (whose short lines and simple language offer some basis of comparison for the anglophone reader), is somehow, unlike Hardy's, redemptive. In "Lines,"where the extended figure is employed most successfully, markings on the face become grooves in a recordfor the wearer to "listen to / his master's voice.""Thus"echoes GerardManley Hopkins's "generations have trod / have trod / have trod,"and although Rufus cannot praise the glory of God, he concludes that hunger,neithertoo greatnor too lit-

tle, offers a space in which humanity can eat and love. Less effectiveis "Visitors,"in which hunger, death, poverty, and worry find consolation in the fact that "Theearthcame to us and broughtflowers." The next line, "And that's the truth,"serves better as title to this volume than as conclusion to the poem. Perhaps too much aware of his position as "a kind of national conscience for Slovakia and its people"- Milan Richter'swordsRufus too often flattenshis endings with didacticgeneralizations. English-speakingreaders may be missing something in translation, for many of the poems do not seem to generate effective internal rhythms. Perhaps Milan Rufus's poems in Englishare best read singly, as meditationsratherthan lyrics. Seen this way, they bring a valuable new note into poetry in English. RobertMurray Davis University of Oklahoma Wistawa Szymborska. Monologue of a Dog: New Poems. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisiaw Barahczak, trs. BillyCollins, foreword. Orlando, Florida. Harcourt. 2006 (© 2005). xiv + 96 pages. $22. isbn0-15-101220-2

Nobel Prize-winnerWislawaSzymborska's latest collection of poems contains a few older pieces as well as a handful of new poems in her signature style: the poet shuttles between the naive questions that make a mystery, sometimes a miracle, out of life, and the simple idiosyncraticroutine that is living. When one reads a Szymborska poem, both of these poles are dramatized with infinite compassion. One of the greatest accomplishments of this poetry is the way it forces us to open our eyes to the secularwonders of daily life. These

includestatesof imagination;Szymborska'spoems continue to delight in the way they takethe existenceof fanciful states absolutely seriously. Reality and imagination are in a playful competition- each has the potential to outstrip the other. In one poem, the speaker remembers her childhoodfearof being trapped underwaterin a bottomlesspuddle that would eventually dry up and seal her under the earth.In the final stanza,she tells us, "Understanding came only later: / not all misadventures / fit within the world's laws / and even if they wanted to, / they couldn't happen." The misadventureis, of course, real- it has been imagined,has it not?It has been experiencedwithin the mind and produced a counterreaction;it has been dramatizedfor us so we could experience it, too. It simply cannot occur in the exclusionary system of "theworld's laws," yet it exists for all that.Thereis a division between what happens and what we know in our minds by means of affect (the child's fear).This simple little poem leads one to meditateon the division between ontology and epistemology, between empirical and affectiveknowledge.

MARCH - APRIL 2007

73

UJ >

2

Q

dinary, and sometimes agonizing, conclusion.Still, Wislawa Szymborska's disillusions are communicated with such gentle humor,such devastatingly precise concreteness, that one cannot help but assent to her poetic acts. This is truly poetry that both instructsand delights.

O

MagdalenaKay University of California,Berkeley

u < Pi UJ

H

Miguel Torga. Iberian Poems. George Monteiro, tr. & intro. Providence, Rhode Island. Gavea-Brown. 2005. 152 pages. $15. isbn0-943722-33-0

Szymborska's repeated concern is the imagined surplus of reality, which cannot be contained in the "laws"that we form to make sense of our surroundings.A little girl pulls at a tablecloth out of a desire to upset the boundary line between "things that don't move by themselves" and those that do. Her curiosity pre- and postdates Newtonian physics, as an eternal urge towardquestioningthat is one of Szymborska's most endearing qualities.As Billy Collins writes in the foreword, her existential wonder strips us of our presumptuousness. She does this by invertingour usual modes of seeing. There are "historical"poems in the collection, but a Szymborskapoem is never simply historical- it is an exercise in changing perspective.It is wonderful to have the English and Polish texts side by side, though the translationsarefaithfulenough that English-languagereaders need not feel left out of the original poems' magic. If anything, the translation is occasionally more idiomatic or colloquial than the original Polish. Szymborskawrites with a limpidity that can be both charmingand terrifying, as an ordinaryevent leads seemingly logically to an extraor-

74

While Portuguese literature has enjoyed broad internationalreconsiderationfollowingthe awardingof the Nobel Prizeto JoseSaramagoin 1998,poet and prose writer Miguel Torgahas yet to join FernandoPessoa, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Lidia Jorge,and Saramagohimselfamong the ranks of recently discovered or rediscoveredwritersfromPortugal. This is a shame, because Torga's work, written over the course of a long life spanning the greaterpart of his country's agitated twentieth century, enjoys the distinction of being firmly rooted m the writer's local realitywhile remaininghighly accessibleto readers not yet familiar with Portugal and its literary expression. In his voluminous poetic output, Torga presents readers with a stark,durablevision of his country's natural and human landscape- in particular,the hardscrabblepeasant life of his home in Portugal'srural, mountainous Northeast. Torga filters his spare, direct presentation through broader preoccupations with suffering,perseverance,moral uncertainty,and the shared weight of history as well as the force of his own near-mythicpersona.Thewriter, whose real name was Adolfo Correiade Rocha,chose the pseud-

onym "Miguel Torga" in homage to two Miguels from Spanish letters- Cervantesand Unamuno- as well as the torga, a tough, resilient weed native to his province. Torga's uncompromising blend of rural description, social critique, and a uniquely humble brand of personal mythologization is on prominentdisplay in the 1965 collection PoemasIbericos(Iberian poems), composed as a meditation on a common peninsularhistorical and cultural identity. While Iberian Poems, recentlytranslatedinto English by veteran literaryscholar George Monteiro, recalls the epic register of Luis de Camoes's sixteenth-century poem Os Lusiadas and Fernando Pessoa's modernist reworking in 1934's Mensagem, Torga's collection is distinguished by its relentlesspreoccupationwith the earthlymotivationsand human costs associatedwith Portugaland Spain's former glory. Torga spells out this naturalisticimperative in the opening stanzaof "Fado"(Fate), which reads: "A people will have their fate / Cut out for them / In nature'sbook. / A destinyreserved, / Rich / Or poor, / Consonant with the tilled soil."Meanwhile,"A Largada"(Settingout) describesthe departure of the Iberian maritime explorers as the result of earthly pillaging and collectivepsychological torment,with the "anxietiesand the pine groves / Transformedinto fragilecaravels." Throughout Iberian Poems, Torgastrugglesto reconcilethe frequent brutality of Portugal's and Spain's overseas adventures with an alternate, more humane sense of Iberian identity, personified by such figures as Unamuno, Pablo Picasso, and the fictional Sancho Panza- eachof whom receivesindividual poetic tribute. Nowhere is

this conflict more apparentthan in "Camoes,"in which Torgawonders at the "grandeur"of Portugal'scelebrated literary patriarch,describing him as an "immeasurablecedar / Of the small Portuguese forest," even as he bemoans the role of Camoes as "the poet of an empire that was mad" in the Iberianimperial enterprise. With George Monteiro'snew, capably translated edition of Iberian Poems, English-speakingreaders can make theirbelated acquaintance with Miguel Torga. Among the many Portuguese writers ripe for criticalreexamination,Torga,in my opinion, is especially worthy. In his pairing of spare, naturalistic verse and complex theoretical preoccupations,Miguel Torga invokes a set of contrasts- between great mountains and tiny streams, celebratedheroes and anonymous peasants, occasional victories and continuedsuffering- thatbroadens the scope of the writer's Iberian home well beyond the long-defined bordersof Portugaland Spain. RobertPatrickNewcomb Brown University Charles Wright. Scar Tissue. New York. Farrar,Straus & Giroux. 2006. 73 pages. $22. ISBN0-374-25427-3

Scar Tissue,Charles Wright's latest collection of poems, has the same depth, verve, and complex originality we associate with his best poetry; this is the work of a master poet fully realizing his gift and is not to be missed. We find here Wright's characteristiclayering of perspectiveand techniquethe poetic equivalent of Cezanne's multipleplanes. He achievesthis in part through his characteristically variedand sometimescomplexsentence structures- my favoritebeing

his use of parallelabsolutephrases; his startlingly original metaphors; his mesmerizing,private voice; his brilliant intellect, moving freely from the universal and learned to the local and intimately personal; and his delicately nuanced emotional registers.The entiremontage of Wright'simages and techniques creates a precise resonance, an interiority and meditative timbre unmatchedby any othercontemporarypoet. One difference between this newest book by Wright and his previous work is perhaps one of degree: his usual elegiac and nostalgic strains seem even more prominentthanbefore.In the poem we read: "People "Transparencies" have died of thirst in crossing a memory. / Our lives are summer cotton, it seems, / and good for a season." Perhaps a better example is this ending to "TheWrong End of the Rainbow":"Look,we were young then, and the world would sway to our sway. / We were riverrun, we were hawk's breath. / Heart'slid, we were center'sheat at the center of things, l) Remember us as we were, amigo, / And not as we are, stretchedout at the wrong end of the rainbow, / Our feet in the clouds, / our heads in the small, still pulse-pause of age, / Gazing out of some window, still taking it all in, / Our arms aroundMemory, / Her full lips telling us just those things / she thinks we want to hear." We go to Wright's poetry because we must, because we can't quite get the fullnessof intellectand enlarged sphere of feeling found in CharlesWrightanywhereelse. Fred Dings South Carolina University of

MISCELLANEOUS Marcel Cohen. In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura. Raphael Rubinstein, tr. Jerusalem. Ibis. 2006. 119 pages. $13.95. isbn 96590125-4-3

Marcel Cohen wrote this text in 1981 in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish,or Djudyo, the language of the Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain in 1492), addressing it to his friend, the Spanish painter Antonio Saura (1930-98). Sixteen years later, he translatedit into French,and it is that version which Ralph Rubinstein used as the basis for his English translation.The originalLadino version is included in this volume, along with an introductionby the translator and several line drawings by Saura.Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1937 into a family only recently arrived there after having dwelled for five centuriesin Istanbul, MarcelCohendescribeshimself as a 'TurkishSephardi."His choice to write in Ladino, the language that echoed through his childhood but which he himself had never actually practiced as a writer, is a strategicone. It is also a very pungent one. "I'd like to write to you in Djudyo/' he tells Saura,"before the language of my ancestors is completelyextinguished."How can a language die, he wonders, and what partof culturedies along with it? Cohen points out that he is the last surviving member of his family to understand Ladino- and in point of bitter fact, he lost most of his family soon after arriving in France,in the Holocaust. Choosing to write in Ladino, "deathspeaksthroughyourmouth," Cohen suggests; and it is death in its various guises that looms most darklyhere, as Cohenmourns

MARCH - APRIL 2007

75

>

UJ

PL

z D H LU

H

Q

ai O

both individuals and the people to whom they belonged. Silence, too, is a kind of death, as is forgetting. Yet speech and remembrancecan testify to loss, Cohen wagers, in ways that otherkinds of memorials cannot. Words themselves contain tracesof the people who once used them in their daily speech, and perhaps those traces may be distilled somehow in a text that places the quiddity of language itself on display. That is undoubtedly why Cohen decided to preserve certain key Ladino words in his French translation, glossing them in an appendix,a practicethatRubinstein has followed here.Thosewords vex the English in productive ways, calling it into question in a hybrid language whose principal tone is itself interrogative.Theyinscribeon the very page the diasporicexperience of a people that was exiled in turn from Jerusalem,from Spain, and from the great cities of the Ottoman Empire such as Salonika, zmir, Safad, and stanbul. In that perspective, Marcel Cohen's focus here is both very particular and very general.He speaks of his own exile fromwhat ought to have been his mother tongue; yet each of his utterancesserves to underscorethe broadlyexemplarycharacterof that condition,as a once-vibrantculture draws its last breathsand whispers a few final,elegiac words. WarrenMotte University of Colorado

Helene Dorion. Sous I'arche du temps. Paris. La Difference. 2005. 95 pages. €13. isbn2-7291-1578-1 . Ravir: Les lieux. Paris. La Difference. 2005. 107 pages. €14. isbn 2-7291-1575-7

Between 1986 and 2003, Helene Dorion wrote a number of short essays that attempt to determine how writing and being in the world relate one to the other.Sous l'arche du tempsregroupsand revisessome of these texts: "Habiteren poesie" (1986);"LeDetaildu poeme"(1986); "La Fenetreouverte" (1988);"Penchee pour ecrire"(1989);"Le Ciel, l'invisible et la catastrophe"(1991); "Poesiejetee sur la vie" (1991);"Le Cceurdu poeme" (1994);"Chemins de l'inconnu" (1996); "Sous l'arche du temps" (1998);"Cheminsde TOuvert" (1998); "Signes" (2001); "Ressentirla Terre"(2001);"Fragments de paysages" (2002); "Portraits d'ecriture"(2003);and "Celebrationdu vivant"(2003). What these essays share is the belief that writingis aboutreciprocity and that writing renews our ties to the world.. In toclay's material world, Dorion wants to remind us that being should not be trumped by doing and making:"Aux desordres sociaux, culturels et raciaux, aux crises politiques, economiques et ecologiques d'une civilisation divisee, la poesie repond par la continuity de l'etre et le portrait detaille d'une conscience." In Ravir: Les lieux, which won

the Prix Mallarme 2005, all five poems- "Ravir:les villes"; "Ravir: les ombres"; "Ravir:les miroirs"; "Ravir:les fenetres"; and "Ravir: les visages"- continue to privilege a poetic listening that brings the world into language- "les vagues

76

avancent, resonnent / comme des syllables contrela coque"- and the writer into the world- "Voiladone ce que nous possedons / d'une ville: l'ombre qu'elle fait / dans nos corps,le battement/ au loin, le battement / proche de sa langue.o As its title suggests,Ravirattendsto what is exquisite in our exchanges with the world, which may forcibly take our breath away. Helene Dorion's careful use of language recallsthe passage of time- and its markupon us. Maryann De Julio Kent State University

Evald Flisar. Collected Plays. Vol. 1. Guilderland, New York. Texture. 2006. 624 pages. $45. isbn0-9712061-4-7

Evald Flisar,the versatileSlovenian writer, editor, and traveler,reveals in these seven of his twelve plays his ability to adapt to- and froma variety of sources and cultures. He has written radio plays for the Australian BroadcastingCommission and the BBC;he draws upon themes and characters from the Western canon, from Dostoevsky to Ibsen to Wagner and especially Shakespeare;the plays have been produced on at least three continents and have an appeal not limited to any countryor culture. As Flisarnotes in his introduction, "Most,if not all, of my central charactersaredeeply markedby the feeling of emptinessthat permeates their efforts and the world around them." Nevertheless, by seizing that emptiness, the charactershave a chance of "breakingout of the ring of futile wasting of energy and coming to terms with what cannot be avoided."

happily assumes- just before the knock on the door that announces a new judge and a new challenge to the precarious balance he has achieved with Rembrandt,Nijinski, and Yessenin. The Eleventh Planet deals with

Most of the plays use a single set in order that the charactersbe forced within these limits to create "imaginary,alternativeworlds/' to demolish those created by others, and either to retreat into fantasy or to recognize the impenetrability of the walls, mostly self-created, that prevent them from escaping. In contrastto Sartre'sNo Exit, hell is not otherpeople; it is oneself and one's illusions. Flisar seems to realize his themes most successfully in plays thathave no more than four characters.Tomorrow has echoes of Waiting for Godotin the new judge Mishkin's desire to meet the Supreme Judge and ask for direction,so that he may achieve order in the bleak Siberian landscape and not have to assume responsibilityfor a truth that he imposes with a gun. The SupremeJudge turns out to be the silent, unseen servantwhom Mishkin shoots, who has performedall the menial, life-sustaining tasks, and whose role Mishkin almost

the efforts of three vagabonds, escaped from a mental institution, to escape the "bonker,"bourgeois world and escape to a planet where their "milk of human kindness" can leaven the population. As the authoritiesapproach,however,they draw a rocketship to escape- only to realize that they've forgotten to include the motor and that bonkerism may be inescapable. Nora Nora, in which the characters are ironically aware of A Doll's House, and The Nymph Dies

are more complex in the interweaving of disguises, assumedidentities, and betrayalsand counterbetrayals and would probablybe more effective in production,as would What about Leonardo?and Uncle from America,both with largercasts. Nevertheless,all deserve to be produced. Experimental theaters and reading groups should find these plays, especially the ones with small casts, easy to produce, and their audienceswould find the plays by a significant playwright very rewarding. RobertMurray Davis University of Oklahoma Alexander Masters. Stuart: A Life Backwards. New York. Delacorte. 2006. 300 pages, ill. $20. isbn 0-38534000-1

Born in New York and educated in London and Cambridge across the Atlantic, Alexander Masters is a travel writer and illustratorwho

has been working with the homeless in England for the last five years. He gives us an authentic account of the plight of homeless people there through the study of one life in Stuart: A Life Backwards.

While campaigningfor the release of two charityworkers arrestedby the police, the author strikes up a friendship with Stuart, a fellow campaignerwhose "symbolicsense of justice . . . expressionsof hatred . . . carelessnesswith life and longing for calm" elevate him to the rank of a "biblicalcharacter"in the eyes of Masters,who delineates a panoramicview of Stuart'swretched life in his very firstbook. StuartClive Shorterwas born Stuart Turner in September 1968 in Midston,England.After his violent father abandoned the family, his mother married Paul Shorter, prompting Stuart to change his family name. His problems begin early in life when his older brother and the babysitter rape him. He is sent to a school for the disabled because he has borderlinepersonality disorder and also muscular dystrophy.These disabilities,however, do not attractsympathy from otherboys in the street.They insult him with "wobblefoot,""spaghetti legs," and "bandyboy." Not being able to swallow such indignities,he head-butts his tormentorone day. This discovery of violence changes Stuart's life forever as he relishes "thefreedomfrom weakness." At the age of eleven, Stuart runs away from home, resortingto a life of glue-sniffing,fighting, and stealing. This cripple with gypsy roots even becomes a National Frontskinhead for a time. He cannot hold down a job because he

MARCH - APRIL 2007

77

> LU Pi

z UJ

D LU

H Q

O

is drunk all day. But he catches the eye of a twenty-four-year-old night manager of a homeless shelter when he is sixteen and fathers a baby with her. The relationship peters out when he smashes "to pieces''a motorbikeshe has bought for him. One night he forcefully enters her house, sets fire to it, and threatensto kill theirson, for which he is imprisoned. But his violence continues in and out of jail. He is sent to prison again for robbing a post office. When he is finally releasedafterfour and a half years, he finds a modicum of happiness with a new girlfriendand fights to free two charity workers arrested on suspicion of allowing drugs on the premises. Thus he meets Masters, the writer who is also fighting for the same cause. When Stuart seems to be living a normal life, he is suddenly,and tragically,knocked down by a train. The authorpresents the unfortunateevents of Stuart'slife not only in apt words but also with pictures and illustrations, taking us back to his happy-go-lucky childhood from the time he meets him. Hence the subtitle:A Life Backwards.It is a biography that often reads like a gothic novel- shocking, moving, and hilariousat the same time. This is not nineteenth-centuryEngland, but the Stuartsof the kingdom certainlylive in "HardTimes/' to use a Dickensianphrase. And Alexander Mastersdeservescreditforbringing that to light. Ronny Noor University of Texas, Brownsville

Na trecem trgu: Antologija nove kratke price Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore. Srdan Papic, project coordinator. Selja Sehabovic, Olja Savicevic Ivancevic, & Jelena Angelovski, eds. Belgrade/ Kikinda. Narodna biblioteka "Jovan Popovic" /Treci Trg. 2006. 213 pages. €8.24. ISBN 86-7378-018-7

This is a superbselection of new authorsand short stories from Bosnia and Hercegovina,Croatia,and Serbia/Montenegro, each section compiled by an editor from that country. The afterword'sstress on work in a "mutually understandable language" suggests a fertile literaryscene where writers search out, admire (or detest), learn from, and react to any other artisticpersonalitiesthey can understand. Thebook was publishedin Belgrade, but it contains much more ijekavian than ekavian (or ikavian).

The stories offer other linguistic features: Dalmatian dialect; Vlado Bulic's play with local variants in "www.i-buy.hr." Mima Simic exploits gender-markingthat, like the Spanish nosotras,allows clear expression of lesbian sexuality. Other languages appear,especially Englishbut also Hungarian(Andrea Pisac's "Return to Balatonszentgorgy"); references to Amsterdam and the United States evoke exile and emigration.Some stories stress violence and war (especially those of Srdan Papic), but more do not; love and sex dominatein the stories from Bosniaand Hercegovina. The thought-provokingselection mixes more traditionalstyles with experimentalpieces, with an averageof twelve pages per author. Here is "The Visit," by Jovanka Uljarevic,in its entirety: "Goodevening.Forgiveme for disturbingyou, but you'vebeen doing thatto us for a long time, so I had to drop in and ask

78

you to turndown thatdreadful music." "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I was alone in the building.I didn't know you were living heretoo." "Iam not living." "No?!" "I'mjustan apparition." "But you rang at my door and I openedit. I see you. I can touchyou if I wantto." "Ithinkthat'syourproblem." Enes Halilovic's "TheSock,"a timeless parable on exile, is especially recommended. The book has an unfortunate number of typographical errors, and the review copy is missing one page. Nevertheless, the approach and realizationare cheering.Eight of the fourteenauthorsand editors are women, and any forebodingat a "formerYugoslav"anthologylifts upon seeing a Muslimname among the authorsfromSerbiaand Montenegro. The stories are almost all of high quality,and the authorsreally are new, all born between 1974and 1980. Na trecemtrgu is very much worth reading. SibelanForrester SwarthmoreCollege

graphic literature

fC

Speeding Bullet Comics Speeding BulletComics,located in Norman,Oklahoma, will celebrateits tenth anniversaryin 2008. The store stocksover 600 new comicstitles, 5,000differentgraphic novels, action figures, statues, and other comics collectibles. They have over 100,000back issues available. In 2005the storewas nominatedfor the EisnerSpirit of RetailingAward, presented by Comic-ConInternational to comics shops that have effectively contributed to both the community and the industry at large. The storehas sponsoredthe locallibrarytourof ComicRelief, a lectureprogramdeveloped by shop owner MattPrice, who also writes a weekly comics column for Oklahoma City'sOklahoman newspaper.SpeedingBullethosts visitand writers artists,including David Hopkins, Brock ing Rizy, and GeoffJohnsin recentyears. In addition to selling comics, Speeding Bullet operates the Ricochet Cafe, "the world's only superhero deli."RicochetCafe,open every Wednesday,specializes in the hero sandwich. For more information,or to buy theircomics,visit www.speedingbulletcomics.com.

Travis Preston, manager of Speeding

2

I

Bullet Comics

great places to more

find comics

The Museum of Comic & CartoonArt The Museum of Comic and CartoonArt in New York City does everything a traditionalart museum does, but with comics. Their collectionsand exhibits include every genre of the art medium, including animation, anime, caricature,cartoons,comic books, comic strips, computer-generatedart,editorialcartoons,gag cartoons, graphicnovels, humorousillustration,illustration,political illustration,and sportscartoons. Themuseum intendsto educatethe publicaboutthe medium, which they call the world's most popular art. Beyond an elementaryunderstandingof the form, they promotethe study of comicsand cartoonsas a significant source of dialogue in today's society and as important documentation of historical events. The museum is interested in censorship, self-censorship,and freedom of speech, as reflectedin comic creationand publication. This year, they also began to showcase local cartoonand comic artists. MoCCA offers frequent lectures and workshops featuring cartoonists and comics writers. Most events are free and open to the public. Other recent exhibits have included The Golden Age of Saturday Morning Cartoons, She Draws Comics: 100 Years of America's Women Cartoonists,Will Eisner:A Retrospective,Stan Lee: A Retrospective,and Cartoons against the Axis: World War II War Bonds Cartoons.On June 23-24 the museum will host the sixth annualMoCCAArt Festival, New York's independent comics festival. For a complete listing of currentevents and exhibitions,visit the museum website at www.moccany.org. Compiledby David Shook

March-April2007 179

outposts LiteraryLandmarks & Events

Lambiek

Comics Shop Amsterdam, Netherlands ARMANDO CELAYO

Located on Kerkstraatnear the Liedseplein in central Amsterdam,LambiekComics opened shop on November 8, 1968.It is not only Holland'sfirst comic shop but Europe'sas well. Since opening its doors, Lambiekhas become a venerated source for comics and sequential art. In addition to selling comics, Lambiekalso has a gallery that exhibitsart from such Europeanand North Americanillustratorsas RobertCrumb,Tanino Liberatore, ChrisWare,ErikKriek,Daniel Clowes, and Andre Franquin.Lambiekalso has a comprehensivehistoryof Dutch comics,which can be accessedat http:/ /lambiek. net. Lambiek'swebsite also containsthe LambiekComiclopedia,"anillustratedcompendiumof over 8,000comic artists/' Graphic-novelenthusiastscan purchasebooks, posters,and artworkthroughthe website.

80 I World Literature Today

The

the

from

Wind

East

A novel by AlmudenaGrandes Author of the international sensationThe Ages of Lulu "One of Spain'smost successful, and notorious writers . . . Grandes never lets the pace slacken, combining a cracking story with convincing characterization." - Daily Telegraph " [A] classy blockbuster- a layered saga of family life, rivalry and redemption. . . . As a study of obsessive passions and climatic conditions, it makes for a sweeping beach read." - Guardian Available at fine bookstores everywhere and at www.sevenstories.com

$27.95 ' HARDCOVER isbn-io: 1-58322-746-6 ISBN-13:978-I-58322-746-6

SEVENSTORIESPRESS/ WWW.SEVENSTORIES.COM VOICESTO AMERICANREADERS INTRODUCINGACCLAIMEDINTERNATIONAL

The Tongues Blood Does Not Run Dry

Camelia: Save Yourselfby Telling the Truth

Algerian Stories by AssiaDjebar

A Memoir of Iran by CameliaEntekhabifard

"Djebar. . . has givenweepingits wordsand longing its lyrics." - WilliamGass, WorldLiteratureToday

As featuredin O, the OprahMagazine

$23.95 / isbn-io: 1-58322-748-2 / ISBN-13:978-1-58322-748-0

A haunting story by a daringyoung journalistwho escapedimprisonmentin Iranthroughmorallytroubling choices- and by convincingher interrogatorthey werein love . . $23.95 / isbn-io: 1-58322-719-9 / iSBN-13:978-1-58322-719-0

BORDERS WITHOUT AnAnthobgy theEyes TheWorld ofWriters: Through

WORDS

Edited by Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Felman and Samantha Schnee

transportsus Featuringthe work of more than 20 writersfrom 15countries,WordsWithoutBorders to the frontiersof the new literaturefor the twenty-firstcentury In these pages,some of the most accomplishedwritersin world literature- among them Ha Jin, Norman Manea, JavierMarias,and Nobel laureatesWole Soyinkaand Naguib Mahfouz- have stepped forward to introduce us to dazzling literary talents virtuallyunknown to readers of English. Most of their work- short stories, poems, essays,and excerpts from novels- appears here in Englishfor the firsttime. An Anchor Paperback 352 pages $14.00

Everypiece here- be it from the Americas,Africa,Europe,the Middle East South Asia, EastAsia, Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean- is a discovery a colorful thread in a global weave of literary exchange.

Knopf Academic Marketing 1745Broadway, 20-2, New York, NT 10019 WWW.RANDOMHOUSE.COM ACMART

[email protected]

Some of Tim's Stories By S. E. Hinton

A teenager when she first gained fame, now a seasoned writer,S. E. Hinton takes her trademark themes to a new level in Some of Tim's Stor/es-fourteen original stories depicting adults trapped in lives of missed connections and opportunities. The stories in this collection merge into a larger narrative about two cousins, Terry and Mike, whose lives and families are intertwined but whose paths lead to very different futures: one in prison, the other enduring a guilt-ridden existence working in a bar. $19.95 Cloth • 978-0-8061-3835-0

• 160 pages

-

Harpsong By Rilla Askew

HarlanSinger, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family's yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter's with his charm. Soon he and his fourteenyear-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhikingand hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan's long-standing debt. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck's Joads left behind. • 256 pages $24.95 Cloth • 978-0-8061-3823-7

8OO 28OO

OKLAHOMA

OF

UNIVERSITY 627 VENTURE

•

7377 DRIVE

•

PRESS

OUPRESS.COM

NORMAN,

OKLAHOMA

7 3 O 6 9