To The End of the Land by David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. Knopf, 582 pages, $26.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Once in a while we get an inkling of what it must have been like to open the pages of such novels as Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, The Sound and The Fury, The Great Gatsby, To The Lighthouse, or The Slave when they were first published, before any reviews or critical essays were written about them.  We understand what it must have been like to feel the greatness of the prose almost viscerally and to know that with the reading our angle of vision has changed forever.

That is how I felt when I finished David Grossman’s new novel, To The End of the Land, translated superbly by Jessica Cohen. It surpasses anything he has written before, and, for me it surpasses anything I have read in decades.  For here is a novel  that makes you feel as if you are living it as you read – something not quite possible in masterpieces of quite a different order, such as A Hundred Years of Solitude, or works by Borges or Cortazar or Calvino.  Or even in Ulysses, which is so heavily buttressed by Homer.

To The End of the Land is rooted in a reality so vivid, is so radiant with life, and is so precise in its delineation of its characters that it would be an important addition to the world’s literature at any time.  But its publication now, when leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Territories are trying to broker a lasting peace, makes it required reading in a way few novels ever are.  For it is about the devastation of war, how war erodes the human spirit, yet how that spirit is far more resilient that we may have ever suspected.  Moreover, it is written with a humanity, an intimacy and a generosity that make it unique.

Although well known in Israel, where he was born in 1954, and in Europe where he has received many prestigious prizes, Grossman is not as famous in this country for his fiction as he is for his leftist politics and his non-fiction book, The Yellow Wind, which deals with Israeli Palestinian conflict and in which he is fiercely critical of Israeli policy.  Or for the devastating fact that he lost a son in the 2006 war with Lebanon.  At the close of To The End of the Land, is a note worth quoting in its entirety because it tells the story exactly:

I began writing this book in May of 2003, six months before the end of my oldest son, Jonathan’s, military service, and a year before his younger brother, Uri, enlisted.  They both served in the Armored Corps.
Uri was very familiar with the plot and the characters.  Every time we talked on the phone, and when he came home on leave, he would ask what was new in the book and in the characters’ lives.  (“What did you do to them this week?” was his regular question.)  He spent most of his service in the Occupied Territories, on patrols, lookouts, ambushes, and checkpoints, and he occasionally shared his experiences with me.

At the time, I had the feeling – or, rather, a wish—that the book I was writing would protect him.

On August 12^th, 2006, in the final hours of the Second Lebanon War, Uri was killed in Southern Lebanon.  His tank was hit by a rocket while trying to rescue soldiers from another tank.  Together with Uri, all of the members of his tank crew were killed: Bnayah Rein, Adam Goren, and Alex Bonimovitch.

After we finished sitting shiva, I went back to the book.  Most of it was already written.  What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.

The novel begins with a Prologue dated 1967 when war has begun in Israel and three teenage kids – Ora, and Avram and Ilan – are stranded in a hospital with high fevers that create delirium and also a freedom possible only when people are young and in dire straits.  As Ora and Avram share their confusion and their secrets, first with each other, and then in the presence of the other boy, Ilan, you know that this triangle will grow into a haunting connection that only death can break.  Yet Grossman does it with such a light touch, with such authority (somehow you know who is speaking without the usual guidelines), and with so much wit that you are intrigued and enmeshed in these young lives before you know it.

And then, suddenly, it is 2000 and Ora (Or is light in Hebrew) is in a taxi driven by her Arab friend, Sami, taking her second son, Ofer, back to active duty although this is exactly opposite of what she had planned – to hike with Ofer, just the two of them, in the Galilee after Ofer finished his tour of duty.  How had they gotten here?  She goes over it in her mind:

[She asks,} “But did they call to let you know?”  Because she remembered she hadn’t heard the phone ring. . .

“What difference does it make who called?  There’s an operation, and there’s an emergency call-up, and half the country’s being recruited.”

Ora wouldn’t give in—Me?  Pass up getting pricked with such a perfect thorn? she asked herself later—and she leaned weakly against the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest and demanded that he tell her exactly how things had progressed to that phone call.  She would not let up until he admitted that he had called them that morning, even before six he had called the battalion and begged them to take him, even though today, at nine-zero-zero, he was supposed to be at the induction center for his discharge, and from there to drive to the Galilee with her.

Once Ofer has returned to active duty Ora is trapped, first in the cab with Sami as he uncharacteristically makes her uncomfortable on an errand of his own, and then back in her flat where she seems doomed to wait through the next 28 days of Ofer’s tour for word of him.  However, something in her rebels and she decides that she will put herself out of reach of all communication and take that hike by herself, or, better yet, with her old friend, Avram, whom she hasn’t seen in years, who is just a shadow of who he used to be, but who, to her surprise, consents to join her.

The rest of the novel is a walk, sometimes a tramp, sometimes a real hike up mountains and down, during which we get a sense of Israel’s natural beauty, and during which they meet other people and occasionally interact with them.  They prepare food, they sleep, Ora writes in her notebook, but mostly they talk, and as they talk Ora brings Ofer to life for Avram, and we learn how these three have lived since their fateful meeting.  Grossman takes his time, but each page is gripping as we find out more and more about Ora’s marriage to Ilan, about her two sons, Adam and Ofer, and about Avram’s life as well.

Unlike Scheherazade Ora tells only one story -- of her complicated family, but like the ancient storyteller, it is to save a life -- not her own, but Ofer’s.  For if she and Avram don’t know Ofer’s fate, then surely he has to stay alive.  This is the kind of magical thinking we all know, especially those of us who have children.

Author David Grossman displays an uncanny insights into the details of family life.

What makes the book so remarkable are Grossman’s uncanny insights into the details of family life – often observed only by women, we have mistakenly led ourselves to think – as well as his ability to erase chronology and move around in time.  Ora and Avram’s lives are, literally, turned inside out, revealing parts that are so painful to read that one sometimes has to close the book for a moment to take a breath.  And yet there are other parts so surprising, so amazing, that you feel that these two people are being reborn, that they are not only trying to keep Ofer alive, but are becoming alive to each other again.  As they talk, their lives and memories become so intertwined that we are in several moments at once.  This is a marvelous achievement, what every writer hopes for and what Grossman does seamlessly, but which requires enormous skill.  For by the end, every piece in a puzzle increasingly jagged fits together and finally reveals to the reader the complicated truth of the Ora, Avram, Ilan triangle as well as the tremendous costs of living in a country beleaguered by war since its inception.

I don’t know if my reaction to To The End of the Land was so strong because it could be about my own life, if not for the accident of chance which led my father from Lithuania to America while several of his siblings fled to Palestine to escape the Nazi terror.  I’m sure that’s part of it.  Because I finally understand in ways I never did — even after poring over Amichai and Oz and Yehoshua – how perilous life is in that tiny country for a woman with children, for a man who has had to continue to live after capture and torture, for children to whom death is a constant reality and for people who live, day in and day out, surrounded by friends and neighbors (like Sami) whose feelings are never entirely clear and whose trust can never be entirely taken for granted.  How perilous it is to live a life so permeated with fear.

Yet shining through all that is Ora and her astonishing capacity for love.  Here she is in a scene when Ofer has come home:

She retreats into the depths of the kitchen, brimming with animal happiness.  If she could, she would lick him all over–even now, at his age–and scrub off everything that had stuck to him, restore the childhood smells that still linger in her nostrils, her mouth, her saliva.  A wave of warmth spills out to him inside her, and Ofer, without budging at all, moves a whole hair’s breadth away from her.  She feels it, and she knew it would happen: he seals himself off with that same quick shift of the soul that she knows from Ilan and Adam, from all her men, who time after time have slammed their doors shut in the face of her brimming, leaving her tenderness fluttering outside, faltering, turning instantly into caricature.

Grossman is an Israeli writer, just as his idol, Sholem Aleichem, was a Yiddish writer, but a passage like this compels universal attention and is only one of many that reveal the tremendous value of this novel.  I urge everyone I know, and don’t know, to buy To The End of the Land and savor it as I have.  (I hope the Nobel Prize Committee has read these galleys, too.)  For here in the first decade of this troubled century David Grossman has given us a work of art so complex and tragic yet so beautiful that it will surely be cherished by future generations, not only as a testament to his remarkable gifts but also to the memory of the child he and his wife lost while he was writing it.

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Roberta Silman is the author of Blood Relations, a story collection, three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning the World Again, and a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. She has recently completed a new novel, Secrets and Shadows. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net

The Return by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 224 pages, $23.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the past few years, yet I’ve met few people who could honestly admit to enjoying it. This is no doubt partially due to the book’s length, which is artistically unjustifiable except in the way it creates a kind of “literature of cruelty,” punishing the reader page by page.

It’s not that I mind long books; I recently finished Javier Marías’ stunning Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, a single story split up into three volumes whose combined page count exceeds that of Bolaño’s epic. The problem was more the unremitting squalid repetitiveness of it all. After the hundredth or so description of a prostitute’s brutalized corpse (the book concerns itself with a murder spree on the Mexican border), the book began teetering on the edge of self-parody.

This was always Bolaño’s greatest weakness (if the past tense can be justified; the late Chilean has managed to publish half a dozen books in the past three years, a fecundity matched only by the pulpiest of genre writers): a predilection for litany. Much of 2666 bored me, and I barely managed to get through his novel Nazi Literature in the Americas, a fictionalized encyclopaedia of Nazi novelists.

Yet it is this very tendency that makes Bolaño’s short stories so powerful. Without the dangerous freeedom granted by 1000 blank pages, he manages to create dense catalogs of misery and revelation, and packs more punch into fifteen pages than he managed in all of the second volume of 2666. To complete the metaphor, his recently published collection, The Return, is nothing short of a knockout.

What impressed me most about the thirteen stories in The Return was the coherence of Bolaño’s vision. Though the stories take place in different countries (The United States, Chile, Mexico, Russia) and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism (such as the compelling, Borgesian yarn “Buba,” in which three players on a soccer team perform an African blood ritual that seems to bring them success on the pitch), each new tale feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.

The aimless lovers and murderous lowlifes of 2666 and The Savage Detectives are back, only compressed and concentrated by the word limit. Four stories revolve around murder, and the title story concerns a man who dies and then watches, as a ghost, while a famous fashion designer molests his corpse.

The late Roberto Bolaño: Less is More

Two of the best stories take place in the world of pornography. In one of these, “Joanna Silvestri,” a famous pornographic actress visits Los Angeles and rekindles a romance with one of her old co-stars, who is dying. The scene where she finally leaves him is devastatingly sad: “I turned and Jack was there, standing by the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right and I could go. That everything was all wrong, and I could go. That everything was sorry, and I could go.”

Bolaño’s trademark nods towards metafiction are also alive and well, both in the character of his alter-ego Arturo Belano, and in such stories as “Another Russian Tale,” in which a German SS officer’s accidental mishearing of the Spanish epithet “coño” as the German word “kunst,” meaning art, ends up saving a man’s life.

Perhaps the most powerful stories are the ones that concern the ongoing mythology of Bolaño himself. In “Detectives,” two men discuss Arturo Belano, the young author and political agitator they found in the Chilean prison where they both worked during the Pinochet coup. Recognizing him as an old friend from high school, the men decide to set him free. This is an oft-repeated true tale from Bolaño’s life (and one he told before, from his own perspective, in the short story “Dance Card”), but here it is imbued with metaphorical force. When the detectives take Belano to be cleaned up, he fails to recognize himself in a mirror, even though the fact that others have recognized him was the key to his salvation. The mirror may be something of a cliché, but Bolaño is able to make it feel reflective.

In another story, “Photos,” we watch Belano look through the author photos in an omnibus of French poetry circa 1973, falling in love with the various poets, mourning their passing and, through them, the passage of time:

‘…then Belano thinks about his own youth, when he used to churn it out like Tron [one of the poets], and was perhaps even better looking than Tron, he thinks, squinting at the photo, but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he’d had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly, emblematic Mexicans flowing like a grey breath of air along a dry river bed…’

Having read two of the stories in this collection in The New Yorker earlier this year, I can attest to the value of a second look. Bolaño, presented through the medium of veteran translator Chris Andrews, is revealed clearly as both a master storyteller and a subtle stylist. I feel newly confident in recommending the great Chilean to friends, though I plan to put new emphasis on his short work. These stories do more than serve as an entrée to his novels. They manage to surpass them.

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Tommy Wallach is a writer and musician, and more of his work can be found here.

The Original of Laura: Dying is Fun by Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 304 pages, $35.

Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

Thus life has been an endless line of land
receding endlessly… And so that’s that,
you say under your breath, and wave your hand,
and then your handkerchief, and then your hat.
—Vladimir Nabokov, “Softest of Tongues” (1941)

“The Original of Laura”, released during the holiday season of last year by Knopf, is Vladimir Nabokov’s latest previously unpublished prose work to descend upon the market. One is wary of saying “last” rather than “latest,” as “Nabokov’s Butterflies,” a collection published a decade ago by Beacon Press, was similarly trumped up to be “the last important unpublished fiction by Nabokov.” Dmitri Nabokov, the writer’s son, translated the Russian texts for “Nabokov’s Butterflies.”

He now figures as the editor of his father’s unfinished and deeply incomplete final novel. There is much that needs justifying about the genesis of this edition, and Knopf’s design of the book as an at once commemorative and interactive object (printed on card stock, whose bulk actually highlights the scarcity of textual matter) is as self-serving as Dmitri Nabokov’s introduction, which begins in media res with a brazen captatio benevolentiae:

As a tepid spring settled on lakeside Switzerland in 1977, I was called from abroad to my father’s bedside in a Lausanne clinic.

Nabokov fils goes on to describe his “intervention” in the face of the Swiss doctors’ ineptitude, his “immediate arrangement” of a hospital transfer, and his other feats of efficacy, ultimately futile. All this in a tone that one has to understand, for lack of other plausible interpretation, as triumphant. With the same cruel pomp masquerading as filial respect, he memorializes a humiliating moment that signaled the beginning of Nabokov’s deterioration:

My father had fallen on a hill in Davos while pursuing his beloved pastime of entomology, and had gotten stuck in an awkward position on the steep slope as cabin-carloads of tourists responded with guffaws, misinterpreting as a holiday prank the cries for help and waves of a butterfly net. Officialdom can be ruthless; he was subsequently reprimanded by the hotel staff for stumbling back into the lobby, supported by two bellhops, with his shorts in disarray.

Dmitri Nabokov is eager to dispel the “embarrassed silence” around this incident as well as around other stages of his father’s decline, as if such silence could not possibly be protective. His mannered description of Nabokov’s death—“My mother and I sat near him as, choking on the food I was urging him to consume, he succumbed, in three convulsive gasps, to congestive bronchitis,”—astonishes not only with its affectation but also with the parricidal relish of the moment. Against the background of Nabokov-father’s death, Dmitri Nabokov, the puer aeternus, fashions himself into the protagonist of a narrative meant to justify his defiance of Nabokov’s “express instructions that the manuscript of “The Original of Laura” be destroyed if he were to die without completing it.”

It is true that authorial will has been defied, and to great gains, in the case of Kafka, thanks to Max Brod, and of Housman, thanks to his faint-hearted brother, who, instead of properly burning Housman’s manuscripts, cut them up into tiny pieces and glued them, papier-mâché-style, to larger sheets of paper. (In a textual scholarship class, Housman editor Archie Burnett advised his students: “If you wish that your writings be destroyed, destroy them yourself—before you die.”) However, Dmitri Nabokov’s judgment to preserve and publish “The Original of Laura” as a popular edition lends itself but to trivial gains.

Vladimir Nabokov: He lost his last battle for control.

The unfinished novel with its prose, prurient and unpruned, makes the sum of Nabokov’s output less, not more, impressive. Laura is no “maddening masterpiece” or a work nearly as achieved as “Lolita”—a novel whose rescue by Vera Nabokov from the author’s attempts to burn the manuscript—is invoked by her son to defend his own publication of “Laura.”

But these two acts of defiance of Nabokov’s urge to “efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” any traces of the preliminary, the incompletely-controlled and tell-tale in his work, are only superficially alike: whereas Vera Nabokov helped deliver into the world a fully-formed novel, Dmitri performed a similar operation on something quite unripe.

Consequently “Laura,” an unfinished work of indisputable scholarly interest, is ill-suited for being published as a lavish gift edition. Likewise, it seems strange of its publisher to proffer it coyly as a kind of literary game for grown-ups, since “Laura” is a book about dying—not in the manner of Lolita, as in Martin Amis’s clear-sighted synopsis:

…once the book begins, Humbert’s childhood love Annabel dies, at thirteen (typhus), and his first wife Valeria dies (also in childbirth), and his second wife Charlotte dies (‘a bad accident’—though of course this death is structural), and Charlotte’s friend Jean Farlow dies at thirty-three (cancer), and Lolita’s young seducer Charlie Holmes dies (Korea), and her old seducer Quilty dies (murder: another structural exit). And then Humbert dies (coronary thrombosis). And then Lolita dies. And her daughter dies.

Unlike “Lolita,” whose entire cast is wiped out as if by a plague, “The Original of Laura” ruminates on the gradual, self-willed bodily deterioration of a single character—its narrator. The concentration involved in this sustained meditation is familiar to anyone who ever found oneself slowly picking at the scab after scraping one’s knee. The novel’s other fixation—also physiological in kind—concerns the erotic escapades of the narrator’s wife, first conceived as “Flora” and occasionally referred to by the casually humid nickname “Flo.”

“Flora” morphs—through the tentatively intermediate “FLaura”—into “Laura.” Described to be vengeful and insatiable, Laura is considered mostly in close-up—a lock of hair, a shoulder blade, a slipper at a time—and therefore in fragments. More a fantasy than a character, she is above all an author’s plaything, an element in Nabokov’s game of composition with its familiar clichés (birches, Cossacks, fruits and furs), puns (“Sex, a delightful Swiss resort famed for its crimson plums”), incongruities (the narrator’s claim of pretending “to slam down a marble paperweight” without actually performing the act), and grasping onomastic juggling, as in “the orange awnings of southern summers.” Reaching for awe, extorting a yawn.

The striking feature of Dmitri Nabokov’s edition of “Laura” is the wresting of authorial control, by a son, from a father whose deep obsession with control was manifest throughout his literary career, including this final unfinished novel. “The Original of Laura” is a novel of willed self-obliteration; its publication is an obliteration of its author’s will to obliterate the incomplete novel, a filial cruelty perpetrated with feigned piety.

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Anna Razumnaya is a freelance translator and a doctoral student at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Her translations of two poems by Osip Mandelstam are forthcoming in Pusteblume.

February by Lisa Moore. Grove Press, Black Cat, 320 pages, $14.95.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Some of our best American fiction writers are Canadian — Robertson Davies, Alastair MacLeod, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. And Saul Bellow and Mavis Gallant, who were both born in Montreal but who settled in Chicago and Paris. Into this esteemed company now comes Lisa Moore, who was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1964, and who is every bit as good as her compatriot forebears.

Already honored as a finalist in the Scotiabank Giller Prize contest for her story collection, “Open,” and her novel “Alligator,” which also won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize for the Caribbean and Canada region, Moore is a gifted writer whose prose has an urgency and precision rarely found in someone so young.

Her second novel “February” reveals how Helen O’Mara, a young mother of three and just pregnant with a fourth, deals with the terrible loss of her young husband, Cal who was drowned when the self-propelled oil rig, Ocean Ranger sunk in February of 1982. In using this real event as a lynchpin for her novel, Moore explores the devastation to the O’Maras and their extended family with enormous sympathy and intelligence without ever becoming maudlin.

Helen is already in her mid-50s when the novel begins – her three daughters and two grandchildren live in St. John’s, where she and Cal grew up and married when they were 20 and 21. They had just ten years before Cal’s body was one of the 22 bodies – out of 84 – found when the Ocean Ranger went down. Although Helen seems — to her family and friends — to have adjusted to her widowed existence, she lives a lot of her life in her mind, and in the past when she was bringing up the children alone and before that, with Cal, during the early years of their marriage when they were doing all the hard stuff and beginning to build a life together.

She is also fiercely proud. “Sherry had imagined her to be lonely. Helen was flooded with shame. The blood rushing to her head, making her ears ring. She would not be pitied.” And as she interacts with her children, her in-laws and her sister, both now and in the past, you learn not only to respect her, but to love her, as these finely drawn characters also do. Only Helen’s son, John, her eldest, is far away, and, surprisingly, it is he who changes Helen’s life with a phone call from the airport in Singapore:

His mother was groggy and panicked all at once….
John, his mother said.
She says she’s having a baby, John said.
Who says? his mother asked.
A woman, John said. Who I slept with.
Whom, his mother said. She was half asleep.

And then after John has gone over what happened with the woman carrying the baby, or maybe what he thought had happened:

John wanted his mother to dig deep into the secret womanly knowledge buried in the pheromones and cells and blood of that murky, heady thing he thought of as femininity, and to report back: John, you owe that woman nothing.
A baby, his mother said.

No quotation marks, no hesitations, just their hopes and flaws and prejudices, as well as their amazing ability not to gloss over anything.

One of the most remarkable things in “February” is how Moore erases time, how the past will come up and hit her characters in the face, as when Helen is getting her grandson’s skates sharpened, or when John is having a business lunch in New York. At one point John thinks: “The present is always dissolving into the past…It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds. And later Helen decides: “The past yields, it gives way, it goes on forever. The future is unyielding. It is possible that the past has cracked off, the past has cluttered to the floor, and what remains is the future and there is not very much of that. The future is the short end of the stick.”

LIsa Moore: A writer who knows how to erase time.

Cal is making his way up to the deck. He is hauling himself hand over hand up the stair rail. There is a monstrous crevasse in the concrete ocean and it inspires a terror that is full of calm.
They knew all along. It was decided…
The Royal Commission said there was a fatal chain of events that could have been avoided but for the inadequate training of personnel, lack of manuals and technical information. …
Cal is on the deck and he is almost gone. Please go, she thinks, Please go, let it be over.
Because his panic is in her skin, just as he has made love to her and just as she had his four children, and just as she has watched him sleep and cooked his meals and made up a notion of what love might be and followed through with it. . .
Helen knew Cal’s moods and the two of them gossiped and made up stories and held each other and fought and were careful about what they said, even in anger. And his panic is inside her. The panic of facing death.

As I re-read “February” for this review I realized how much it evoked another favorite book — Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” — in its finely drawn obsession with someone missing. How pleased Woolf would be to see her legacy so beautifully rendered by Lisa Moore.

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Roberta Silman is the author of “Blood Relations,” “Boundaries,” “The Dream Dredger” and “Beginning The World Again,” as well as the children’s book, “Somebody Else’s Child.” She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.

Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 124 pages, $22.95.

Reviewed by Monica Szurmuk

The late Roberto Bolaño’s slim but hypnotic “Monsieur Pain” is an antithriller, a work that proffers the nervy tension of the suspense genre but not its neat resolution. Against the background of the Civil War in Spain, the rise of Nazism, and the imminent breakout of World War II, Bolaño constructs a masterfully elegant narrative with deft touches of irony, dramatic tautness, and even a slightly painful humor, a trademark of his literary project.

The story takes place in 1938 Paris when one of the foremost South American poets of the twentieth century – the Peruvian César Vallejo – lies in a hospital bed dying. The mesmerist Monsieur Pain is called to the writer’s bedside to save his life by Madame Reynaud, a young widow Pain is in love with, and who is a close friend of Vallejo’s wife. Both Vallejo and Pain are real life characters, as are Mme Curie and her daughter Irène, and Vallejo’s wife Georgette. Vallejo died mysteriously in Paris in 1938, and while this death is the excuse for the novel, the mystery is not solved, though the anguish around it defines the peculiar tone of “Monsieur Pain.”

When Madame Reynaud asks Pain to come to the hospital, for example, he inquires about the patient:

“I’m not a doctor, Pierre,” she answers. “I don’t understand these things, it’s something I deeply regret, as you know; I always wanted to be a nurse.” “Her blue eyes shone furiously,” the narrator affirms. “It was true that Madame Reynaud had not pursued advanced studies (in fact she had not pursued any studies at all), but that did not prevent me from considering her a woman of lively intelligence.”

A few lines later, she clarifies “with the intonation of someone reciting a text learned by heart” that Vallejo is suffering from the hiccups and that “in extreme cases, hiccups can be fatal.” A slew of doctors of different nationalities strive to solve the case, that of a man whose organs are working perfectly but who has a fatal case of the hiccups.

Roberto Bolaño: This book offers his customary mix of irony and earnestness.

One of the most celebrated recent Latin American authors, Chilean-born Roberto Bolaño died in 2003 at the age of fifty, leaving behind a massive literary production mostly undertaken in Mexico and in Spain. In this early work Bolaño’s mastery is already clear, as are some of the characteristics that were going to become his trademark such his slippery mix of irony and earnestness, and the self-consciously kaleidoscopic nature of his narrative, reminiscent of two of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century: Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

In “Monsieur Pain” we follow Pain around the streets in Paris in search of a crime that probably does not exist. While he searches for clues and inches closer to the heart of the mystery, the levels of corruption, opprobrium, and heartbreak multiply. Yet despite that sense of discovery we are not any closer to the resolution of the mystery or to a better knowledge of Pain as a character.

An epilogue entitled “Epilogue for Voices: The Elephant Track” features an anonymous character reporting on the future of the characters of the novel. In true Borgean tradition the time-traveling only contributes to the story’s uncertainty, a general sense of uneasiness regarding what is true and what is false, what is real and what is fiction.

One reason to read “Monsieur Pain” is that it offers an entertaining peek at the narrative strategies that Bolaño would develop later in his major works such as “The Savage Detectives” and the monumental “2666.” The best reason to curl up with it, however, is that it is a good read – baffling, exquisite, and also a bit disturbing. It is one of those rare page turners you won’t want to put down, even after you figure out that essential pieces to Bolaño’s puzzle are missing.

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Mónica Szurmuk is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. She is the author of “Mujeres en viaje: escritos y testimonios,” “Women in Argentina, Early Travel Narratives,” “Memoria y ciudadanía,” and co-editor of the “Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos.”

Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee. Viking, 266 pages $25.95

Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

Upon putting down J.M. Coetzee’s most recent novel, “Summertime,” one can be forgiven for running straight to the computer and calling up the Wikipedia entry on its author. After all, when a novelist as critically successful (two Bookers and a Nobel, for starters) and famously reclusive as Coetzee writes a posthumous “biography” of himself, how can you help but wonder how much of it is true?

Coetzee has written two volumes of lightly-fictionalized autobiography before this, “Boyhood” and “Youth,” each of which is written in a close third person, so “Summertime” isn’t exactly breaking new ground. Yet the primary way in which it differentiates itself from the previous two books (aside from the fact that it actually says “fiction” on the cover)—the fact that the protagonist John Coetzee is dead—makes all the difference.

“Summertime” is a finale, a summing up of a life, and the portrait Coetzee (the author, now, whom I’ll refer to by only his last name) paints of his fictional avatar is so unforgivably cruel and insulting that it borders on the parodic. If this book is to be taken as fact, Coetzee sees himself as a talentless failure who has contributed almost nothing to the world at large. But the very writing of the novel seems to contradict that claim. So how much of it is true?

“Summertime” is comprised primarily of interviews with women who were significant in John Coetzee’s life during the mid-1970s. First we hear from Julia, a married woman with whom John had a brief and unsatisfying affair. Then there is his cousin Margot, with whom he shared an awkward night on the South African Karoo when their car broke down. Next comes Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher and mother of one of John’s students. Finally, we hear from Sophie, a fellow professor who also was briefly involved with John romantically.

What binds these women together is their unflagging disdain for John Coetzee. Over the course of the novel, he is maligned in every manner possible. Julia, in-between describing John’s shortcomings as a lover, posits that it would’ve been impossible for any woman other than his mother to love him. Margot calls him a “failed runaway, failed car mechanic…Failed son.” Adriana, who rejected John’s obsessive attentions after accusing him of lusting after her teenage daughter, describes him as “a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man.” She also mocks his abilities as a dancer. Sophie dwells less on the person than his work, claiming John Coetzee “had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition.”

The overall tone of this roast is aesthetic masochism. One could put a serial killer in a room full of his victims’ parents and expect to hear more empathy and understanding. So what is the point of all this abuse? Obviously, there are plenty of people in the world—including this reader—who have the greatest respect for Coetzee.

J.M. Coetzee: An unsmiling, difficult, and dark author?

This question is part of a more general one, which leads us back to Wikipedia. Unlike “Boyhood” and “Youth,” “Summertime” is heavily fictionalized. For example, during the decade at issue in the book, Coetzee (the character) lives alone with his father in a suburb in Western Cape Town. They are a sad, silent Odd Couple, pitied by pretty much everybody who knows them. But in reality, Coetzee (the real person) spent the 1970s with his wife and two children. What gives?

I don’t know exactly what Coetzee’s game is, but my guess is that “Summertime” lands somewhere between C. G. Jung’s “Red Book” and Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho.” Coetzee is airing his deepest fears—that he has wasted his life, that he has never loved or been loved, that he is delusional about his own abilities—admitting that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope. At the same time, he is recreating himself as a monster, imagining how the world would respond to his worst vision of himself. John Coetzee is what J.M. Coetzee might have been, or what he might still become.

In this way, like many of Coetzee’s recent novels, “Summertime” is primarily experimental. While it lacks the lecture structure of “Elizabeth Costello” or the entertaining split-screen hijinks of “Diary of a Bad Year” (a humorously dark and portentous sketch of which is described in the John Coetzee-penned notebook entries that bookend “Summertime”), Coetzee’s newest is an exploration of the self as seen through the lens of fiction. He is able to leave behind his true personality, his true history, even his true abilities as a stylist (the book’s interviews are narrated and administered by John’s biographer, Vincent, who has all the poetic sensibility of the DSM-IV). From this null-place, Coetzee imagines an alternate-reality Coetzee, and tears him to shreds.

Perhaps that explains the incongruously sunny title of the book. There’s nothing like a little time with a monster to make you appreciate the human. “Summertime” is an affirmation of Coetzee as he actually is, unsmiling and difficult and dark. For anyone who is interested in the inner-workings of one of literature’s greatest living minds, “Summertime” will prove satisfying. Just don’t confuse the protagonist with the author. They’re like night and day. Or like winter and summer.

Ordinary Lives,by Josef Skvorecky. Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. Key Porter Books, 237 pages, $14.95

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1924, Josef Skvorecky has produced a body of work that makes him one of our greatest contemporary writers. I suspect the prose is even more beautiful in his native language, (he has become the most beloved Czech writer of his time), but I first came across him in an English translation in 1979 when I read his gorgeous prose poem, a novella called The Bass Saxophone, a meditation on youth and yearning, the seduction of jazz and the pain of dislocation that was part of the life of every young Czech during the Second World War.

Then, in 1984 he published perhaps his most ambitious work, The Engineer of Human Souls, a huge novel juxtaposing Skvorecky’s exile in Canada (he emigrated there in 1968) with his past in Central Europe when his country was devastated, first by the Nazis, and then, after the War, by the Soviets. One of the great pleasures of that book is to see how deeply Skvorecky loves literature, especially our American writers, and how willing he is to reveal that obsessive love as he interacts with his students.

Until his recent retirement he taught English literature at the University of Toronto and ran a small émigré publishing house with his wife of more than fifty years. Engineer was nominated for a Nobel prize and in the 25 years since there have been several more novels – one of my favorites is Dvorak in Love, subtitled A Light-hearted Dream – and detective stories, but Skvorecky has somehow eluded the Nobel prize committee. Perhaps this latest, and possibly last book, Ordinary Lives, will make them take notice.

Although only 201 pages in this excellent English translation by Paul Wilson who has collaborated with him since Engineer, this newest novel has the urgency and magnitude of Skvorecky’s best work as it explores “an ungovernable torrent, scarcely even thoughts” that assails Danny Smiricky, Skvorecky’s alter ego in all his books, who has come back to his fictional hometown Kostelec for two high school reunions – in 1963 and again in 1993.

The volume also proffers the wisdom that comes with living long enough to sort out so many of the mysteries which plague us when we are young. And although at first it may seem confusing to sort out the friends who have come back to these reunions, Skvorecky gives us copious notes, which tell us about these people and refer back to his earlier books, enticing us to read or re-read those previous works.

Both sections of Ordinary Lives begin with the opening I remembered from The Bass Saxophone, “Twilight. Honey and blood. Indifferent to the historical situation of nation and town, it spoke to me, aged eighteen, on the leeshore of a land-locked lea in Europe, where death was less extravagant, more modest . . .” As I read, first “it spoke to me, aged thirty-nine,” and then “it spoke to me, aged sixty nine,” I thought I might feel a sense of resolution, of peace, at the unfolding stories of this group, meeting in the very same Hotel Beranek where The Bass Saxophone had taken place.

Josef Skvorecky writes books that not only embrace his native country, but all of us, in all our flaws and nobility.

But even in his eightieth year (this book was first published in Czech in 2004), Skvorecky has no time for nostalgia. He is determined to show us what really happened to these ordinary people with their ordinary dreams, and when you read, over and over again, about how they were thwarted, not by bad choices, which sometimes happens in countries like the United States and Canada, but because there were, literally, no choices except how to connive and survive under the Nazis and their totally crazy racial laws and then the Soviets and their equally crazy machinations against those who refused to join The Party, and then during the botched efforts at freedom, e.g. the Prague Spring, until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Throughout the book you feel the outrage and frustration at all the might-have-beens, if onlys, and finally at how political beliefs and governments formed far from a town like Kostelec can ruin lives. Forever.

Hilarity mixes with sadness when you learn how people resorted to bizarre solutions merely to live, how they lied, betrayed, hurt those close to them, because they were naïve, or just plain dumb. And because these are the people he grew up with, you feel a sense of intimacy that only the best books can give a reader, as you despair with Danny over how broken some of them are, and how lucky he was to escape and start a new life. At one point, though, when he is called an “emigrant,” he corrects the speaker with “exile.” Let’s get this straight, once and for all, he seems to be saying.

And yet exile has its price. Here is Danny facing himself:

“I was suddenly overwhelmed by indifference, the kind of indifference I had only experienced in Canada when I realized, with a sensation of bliss, that nothing could happen to me there, except that I might die in a plane crash, a quick and, I hope, definitive death. Indifference, our mother, our saviour, our destruction. When I wrote that line a long, long time ago, it was an automatic triad, the instinctive impulse of the conscious mind to organize everything into groups of three, a habit that has lasted down through the ages and is said to have its roots in heathen superstition. Today, I’d exclude destruction, and I’m not even sure anymore that indifference is our mother. But it is certainly our saviour.”

I don’t know another living writer with such a large world view. His compatriot Gustav Mahler said “a symphony must embrace the world.” In his amazing body of prose, Skvorecky has written his own symphony, embracing not only his native country, but all of us, in all our flaws and nobility. And as you make Danny Smiricky part of your literary world, you see that this man who can smirk, who can smear the truth when he’s in a tight spot, is one of us – and that everything he and we have done in the course of our ordinary lives matters more than we could have ever dreamed when we were young.

Roberta Silman is the author of Somebody Else’s Child, a children’s book, Blood Relations, a story collection, and the novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger, and Beginning The World Again, and many stories and reviews published here and abroad. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.

• BBC profile
• Nobelprize.org

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Romanian born German writer, Herta Muller, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature. Muller grew up in Romania under the dictatorship of Nicolai Ceausescu and in the shadow of World War II. She later emigrated to West Germany. Her work reflects those experiences depicting what the Nobel committee called the landscape of the dispossessed. The World’s Jeb Sharp has this profile.

JEB SHARP: You may not have heard of Herta Muller but she’s well known in the German speaking world. Her life and writing span many of the most terrifying experiences in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of what makes her so interesting is that she’s German but not German. She grew up a member of Romania’s ethnic German minority.

BRIGID HAINES: She writes in German but she always says that her writing is very influenced by the Romanian language in way more poetic and has lots of lovely metaphors which she incorporates into German.

SHARP: That’s Brigid Haines, head of modern languages at Swansea University in the UK.

HAINES: Her father was an SS officer and that’s something that’s always disturbed her because she never quite knew what he did in the war. So she had to deal with the legacy of the German guilt. But at the same time she was growing up in a totalitarian regime.

SHARP: And not just any totalitarian regime but that of the hard line Nicolai Ceausescu. Not surprisingly one of Muller’s big themes is dictatorship. By the time she was a student she was in trouble with the authorities as an intellectual and dissenter. Later she was fired from her job as a translator because she refused to collaborate with the Romanian secret police. Muller draws continually on her life in Romania in her writing says Haines.

HAINES: This is an experience that she can’t leave behind. It’s taken hold of her and she writes extraordinarily well about it.

SHARP: Haines got to know Muller a few years ago when she was a writer in residence at Swansea. She says she was great with the students especially in bringing to life what it was like to leave Romania and come to the west – in her case Berlin in the late 1980s.

HAINES: One of her books was reviewed in Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, and she wanted copies of this review. And so she went out and bought 20 copies of Die Zeit. What she didn’t know was that you can photocopy in the west. Because in her experience the only photocopiers in the country, in Romania, were owned by the secret police. She’s a very good ambassador for … . Well for keeping alive the sense of horror and terror and the lasting trauma of dictatorship.

SHARP: But what sets Muller apart is her use of language. She writes novels, essays, poems, and even creates collages out of words and pictures. Poetic is the word that comes up most to describe even her prose. Lyn Marven of the University of Liverpool says her German is infused with Romanian imagery.

LYN MARVEN: The novel that was translated as The Passport is actually called Humans are a Pheasant in the World. And the pheasant in German, she says the pheasant is; well you can picture a pheasant. You know it’s proud. It struts its stuff. It walks in front of cars on the road. It rules the place. But in fact in Romanian the pheasant is a loser. And so it’s one that can’t get off the ground. And that, the dual language, you know the two different backgrounds and that to me seemed very striking. That on the one hand you’ve got this beautiful bird but on the other hand it can’t fly.

SHARP: Marven says Muller often draws her metaphors from nature and the countryside. Her best known work in English is The Land of Green Plums.

MARVEN: The Land of Green Plums uses the image of the unripe plums as something that makes her feel sick. It might even be dangerous. And that’s a metaphor for the knowledge that’s inside her about her father’s past.

SHARP: Marven and other fans are celebrating Muller’s prize today despite a bit of grumbling that the Nobel literature committee is too Eurocentric.

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Light of My Eye, by Paula Jacques. Translated from the French by Susan Cohen-Nicole, Holmes & Meier, 260 pages, $24.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

In an Op-Ed piece in “The New York Times” in June of this year, Andre Aciman chided President Obama for forgetting the 800,000 Jews who either fled or were “summarily expelled” from the Arab and Muslim world in the 20th century. Aciman is one of the approximately 80,000 Jews who lived in Egypt in communities that had prospered for hundreds of years, primarily since the British arrived in 1881 until the fall of King Farouk in the early 50s.

Even during the short term of Egypt’s first president, General Naguib, life continued almost as before. It was with the election of its second President, Gamel Abdel Nasser, that Egypt entered the modern age of industrialization and also became a prime example of what Aciman calls “the rampant nationalism that swept over the Arab world” after the war between Israel and Palestine and the declaration of the Jewish state in 1948.

By 1956 many Egyptian Jews had been forced from their homes, often with little more than a suitcase; businesses, houses, and other assets were confiscated, and those who remained until the end were deprived of their rights as well as possessions. “Looted” is the word used by Aciman who came to New York by way of Italy and is the author of a terrific memoir, “Out of Egypt” (1994). For a long time his book became the archetype about Egyptian Jews; then, two years ago Lucette Lagnado recounted her family’s plight in her moving memoir, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.”

But there was an earlier book that explored the same material in fictional form and was published in French in 1980. Entitled “Lumiere de l’oeil,” by Paula Jacques, born Paula Abadi in 1947 in Cairo, it is a beauty, its lyricism preserved by Susan Cohen-Nicole’s wonderful English translation. With remarkable prowess Jacques draws the reader into the life of the Castro family whose middle child and only girl, Mona, is coming of age just at the time when the old Egypt is giving way to the new.

Although Mona is the principal narrator, Jacques moves with great ease from various points of view to give us a devastating portrait of a large extended family struggling to maintain its equilibrium during the catastrophic events of 1952 and 1956. Indeed, as the book unfolds the Castro family trajectory becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life.

Unlike Aciman and Lagnado who came to the United States, Abadi went first to Israel in 1957, then to Paris where she became a radio talk show host. As Paula Jacques, she is well known in France, with several novels to her credit. “Light of My Eye” is her first to be translated into English and it has the unique exuberance and honesty of many first, largely autobiographical novels. All this background material is noted by the book’s translator, Susan Cohen-Nicole, whose excellent introduction sets the stage for this accomplished novel.

Narrated mostly in the third person to reveal Mona in all her loneliness and resentment at being a girl in a male-centered culture, it is a colorful mix of scenes of family life and Mona’s reactions and delusions and fantasies as she observes their foibles with the eagle eye of a precocious preadolescent.

Soon we are swept up into the lives of the others: the family’s maid, Sayeda, who really runs the household, Mona’s beloved grandmother, Mona’s beautiful self indulgent mother, Becky, the family’s eccentric uncles and communist-leaning cousin, her fiercely independent aunts, and the father whom she adores and whom, she is convinced, will never love her as much as he does his much younger wife.

Customs and conversations are peppered with legends and jokes and many scenes begin in a light-hearted way, but hovering over everything is the fear endemic to those whose existence is threatened. Early on we read:

The frenzied fanatics took their destruction elsewhere – to the luxury stores, the cinemas, the synagogues. Until evening, acrid wreaths of smoke hovered over the city. When the wind dispersed them, on the walls still standing in Suleiman Pasha Square you could read the threats to the English, the insults to the King, and the invocations for death to the Jews.

When Jacques’ novel was published in France, it was criticized as a bit chaotic. Of course it is chaotic, that is the nature of Jewish family life, especially a family on the brink of the abyss. So in an effort to tell the whole story – not only the events of the 50s but what happened afterwards and what came before – Jacques also destroys time with an skill rarely found in a first novelist. Without warning there are monologues from other family members about their pasts or short reports on their fates.

Here is Becky as an older woman telling Mona about her life: “All you have to write is a single sentence: they were chased out of paradise – and you’ve said it all.”

Paula Jacques: Her novel is a heartbreaking chronicle of the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life.

Of course, Becky is describing the privileged lives of the Castro women who are funny and smart and vain, and as elegant as the Levantine French which they speak. While they focus on their bodies and pleasures and card games, their highly intelligent maids bring up their children and, literally, keep these families going despite the shocking and inexorable loss of status and money.

Like many of us who look backwards, Becky remembers only the good and the easy, but Jacques does not spare the reader. There are also evocative, often gritty descriptions of Cairo in all its filth and chicanery, and when she brings her book to a climax, she plunges a desperate Mona into a relationship with an older refugee from Europe, a man so pathetic and broken that this rebellious child has finally stepped into waters too deep, even for her, and perhaps not quite believable to the reader.

Still, that is a minor caveat. What sticks in the mind is Jacques’ insistence on bearing witness to the maze of emotions and connections that make the Castro family unique. We learn about its pretensions and vulgarity and pettiness, but binding them all together is an enormous love and loyalty for each other, which mirrors their love for their lost Egypt. Here, at last, we have her superb story of a people displaced ten years after World War II, another story of exile during that troubled, heart-wrenching time we call the 20th century.

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Roberta Silman is the author of three novels (“Boundaries,” “The Dream Dredger,” and “Beginning the World Again”), a story collection (“Blood Relations”), and a children’s book (“Somebody Else’s Child”). Her stories have been published in “The New Yorker,” “The Atlantic” and many other magazines here and abroad. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.

Christopher Merrill writes: The new South Africa is the setting for this taut crime novel by Deon Meyer, an Afrikaans writer with an eye for the complications wrought by the end of apartheid, the iniquitous political system instituted by descendants of the Dutch settlers. It turns out that few in this country can escape their history, certainly not Lemmer, a personal security guarrd with a checkered past, including a stint in prison for murder, or his client, Emma le Roux, an expert in branding who believes that she saw her brother on television—twenty years after he vanished without a trace. Determined to find him, Lemmer and Emma set off for the Lowveld, a popular tourist destination, and there they discover some hard truths, experiencing along the way no shortage of close calls—with a black mamba, with men in ski masks, with the past itself. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

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Rex by José Manuel Prieto
Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen. Grove Press, 288 pages

Reviewed by Alexander Nemser

José Manuel Prieto’s “Rex” is an adventure through time: not historical time, or physical time, so much as literary time, the dreamy, static continuum of impressions and formulations recorded across centuries and civilizations. As the novel points out repeatedly, and even suspiciously, this is, at the same time, an adventure through timelessness, through the alluring eternal present of Literature as it exists alongside our time-bound passage through life.

Literature’s living presence is felt from the start to completely color, even to derange, the perceptions of the novel’s narrator, J., a defiantly bookish young man hired as a tutor for the son of a Russian family living in southern Spain. The family is apparently in possession of otherworldly wealth, and J. arrives with his imagination raised to a frantic height of daydreaming by his obsessive reading of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”

The protagonist is almost immediately disappointed by the lack of taste, with the “whisper of surf barraging the coast” emerging from silver column-shaped speakers, and everything shining with a “doubloon glint.” J.’s ward, Petya, the addressee of the narrative, turns out to be a child with a mind distorted to idiocy by television like “a vinyl disc scratched by an oversize needle”; his every movements are followed by Batyk, the family’s mysterious “Filipino butler” who in fact displays all the qualities of a native of the Russian province of Buryatia; and he is completely unable to identify how Vasily Guennadovich, the father of the house, acquired his money, as much as he makes inquiries of Nelly, his dazzling wife who appears wearing necklaces surreally tinted diamonds, but never leaves the house.

As J. begins his lessons with Petya, based exclusively around commentaries on Proust’s novel, referred to by the Borgesian phrase “the Book” (“Everything is there in the Book, everything!”), the tutor finds himself embroiled in an elaborate conspiracy of sordid motives and ambiguous threats.

What follows is a fantastic plot involving a scheme to sell synthetic diamonds to a pair of cold-blooded Russian gangsters, the development of an anti-gravity machine, a platinum blonde who glows “like a creature from another world, from Epsilon Indi of the constellation of Tucana,” and another, even wilder scheme to orchestrate the resurrection and imposture of the Imperial House of Russia, with Vasily masquerading as the lost king, one of the multiple implications of the book’s title. But as the story develops, “Rex” is hijacked, for the better, by the Prieto’s considerable stylistic facility, and, further, by his ambitious and generous project of engagement with the history of literature.

Like Vladimir Nabokov, whose presence is never far from the author’s work (one of Prieto’s earlier novels, “Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire,” is a kind of book-length tribute to the Russian novelist), Prieto possesses a talent for description through surprising and extended flights of imagery, as when J. relates how he watched the beguiling Nelly go swimming wearing a necklace of incredible red and blue jewels: “I would follow her progress with the attention of a sentry watching a submarine’s red and blue navigation lights in the dark waters of an estuary.”

And when the two go on a romantic walk along the coast, he imagines the two of them like “a pair of assistant directors scouting along the edge of a steep cliff for the right location to film a scene of love and complicity against the wide-open sky.” Prieto’s images give the novel an alternately lyrical, hallucinatory, and ironic quality, both enriching and deflating J.’s account of the outrageous, at times to the point of being pulp, sequence of events.

José Manuel Prieto -- conversing with literary history

But Prieto’s main accomplishment is to have created a structure which so subtly and humorously enters into dialog with ideas of literary history: the way a new work is inextricably molded by its predecessors; the relentless drive of a work to outlast time and fortune; the fraudulence of commentary when faced with artistic greatness. The book constantly questions its own structure, doubts itself, and curls back around on its own premises: reviewing his own subject matter, J. asks, “Isn’t that enough for an original book, a straightforward book, written out point by point, without flashbacks or commentaries, should anyone, a primary writer, be disposed to do so?”

The text is punctuated throughout with fragments from Literature’s endless present, which appear in boldface, frequently without gloss, held up by J. as concentrations of wisdom, indictments of banality, even exact formulations of the phenomena he is recounting. In one funny moment, J., to prove the all-encompassing nature of Proust’s novel, demonstrates that even “The Matrix” was predicted by “the Book”: a description of “Saint-Loup’s two fists” wheeling in an “unstable constellation” of fists is shown to anticipate the scene in which a robotic agent catches up with Neo in a metro station and “launches a series of quick blows, a wheel of fists…like the blades of a windmill.”

Later in the novel, however, J. begins making much wider references to “the Book,” which turns out to contain not just Proust, but all of literature. And J.’s quotations from dozens of writers, from Herodotus to Shakespeare to Isaac Asimov, ultimately compose the very fabric of the novel. In this way, “Rex” ends up reading like a fanciful projection of what is to be found in between the lines of Literature itself, a reflection on the way in which literature and reality ceaselessly comment on each other, and an expression of mortal gratitude for the alternative Literature offers in the face of what is still unrealized.