Mário de Andrade, _Mácunaíma: The Hero with No Character_, trans. Katrina Dodson

 ...WHAT THE heck is this? It's almost one hundred years old, for one thing, first published in Brazil in 1928. The main character, Mácunaíma, is a folklore figure, an infinitely resourceful trickster who outsmarts every opponent and sleeps with everyone's girlfriend while also being capable of feats of strength--so, maybe Br'er Rabbit plus John Henry plus Pecos Bill? Except that he at one point takes off for São Paolo and masters the accelerated, mechanized, bristling with modernity urban environment as thoroughly as he mastered the Amazonian forest and the backlands. 

Translator Dodson's afterword mentions Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and the Tropicália movement of late 1960s Brazil (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes), and both comparisons make sense: traditional material laced with the latest and most electrifying modernist concoctions, Paul Bunyan on LSD. Start with stories from the indigenous peoples living by the Amazon, stir in some of the traditional wisdom of the enslaved African peoples who slipped off to start their own settlements in the forest, top liberally with heteroglossia of Finnegans Wake, and serve. 

Dodson also mentions Rabelais--right about that too, the same erudite sending-up of erudition, the same blowing up of literary decorum, the same feeling that these characters are much, much larger, in every way, than we are.

I suspect that there are a good many expressions in Andrade's Portuguese that just do not go easily into English, leading Dodson to creaky colloquialisms ("pizzazz") that show up on the pages like leaky, wrinkled balloons. What are you going to do? Props to her for going ahead and getting it done (and props to New Directions for publishing it). What must it have been like to go from Clarice Lispector to this?

Sam Tanenhaus, _Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America_, Part 1: Prodigy in the Making

 THIS NEW BIOGRAPHY is as good as the reviews are saying it is, but with notes and index it does clock in at just over a thousand pages, and knowing myself as I do, I expect it will take me the better part of a year to finish. That being the case, it seemed better to post my notes on it section by section, rather than waiting until I have finished the whole book. This way, the details are relatively fresh in my mind.

The main outline of Buckley's career is relatively familiar stuff, given how famous he was, but Tanenhaus has added a wealth of detail.

(1) I already knew, for instance, that Buckley grew up wealthy and privileged in Connecticut with a great clan of siblings. What I did not know was that even though the Buckley children had the usual horses and private schools and extensive travel associated with their class, the family's devout Catholicism made them a bit apart, a bit of an "other." 

Tanenhaus conjures up the Buckley family childhood as a little bit Swallows and Amazons, a little bit Mitford sisters: a world of its own, with rivalries, private jokes, keen enthusiasms. Founded in privilege, yes, but also astonishingly self-sufficient psychologically and emotionally. Also surprisingly well-versed in the Spanish language and Mexican culture (The father had made his fortune in Mexican and Venezuelan oil.)

(2) Young Bill's first political passion was America First and Charles Lindbergh, the anti-intervention movement that was gathering momentum in 1940 and 1941 but evaporated after Pearl Harbor. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was passionately (and unsurprisingly) opposed to the New Deal and also, it turns out, dead set against American involvement in World War II. Son Bill, a teenager, enthusiastically joined the cause, taking the America First side in debates at his school (Millbrook Academy). 

(3) Buckley always seemed to have a Southern Agrarian, I'll-take-my-stand streak to his conservatism, and it turns out he came by it honestly: besides the big place in Connecticut, the family had a big place in South Carolina. Tanenhaus reports that the Buckleys treated the mainly Black household help in South Carolina well, but the family shared their white southern neighbors' opinions on the rightness of segregation.

(4) Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was written the year after he graduated and counts as an early example of one of the enduring American literary genres: the right hook aimed at academia (later practiced with great success by Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Christopher Rufo).

(5) Again and again, one's jaw drops at Tanenhaus's spadework. For instance: World War II was still on when Buckley finished high school, and he went into the army. His unit was scheduled to go to the Pacific, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a quick close, so Buckley spent his stint doing administrative work in Texas. Tanenhaus found out exactly what he did and how well he did it. I'd call that going the extra mile. He doesn't spend a long time describing Buckley's duties and does not attempt to overstate their importance...but he does actually have the goods. Every page testifies to just how thorough his research was.

David Trinidad, _Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems_, (1 of 2)

 TRINIDAD CAME UP with an ingenious way of organizing the book. Most "new and selected" volumes tuck the new poems at the end, but Trinidad put them in front and gave that section its own title, "Black Telephone." The section is about the length of a generous collection (120 pages), so I would not be annoyed to plunk down $19 for this even had I already purchased the volumes from which the "selected poems" were selected.

I don't know Trinidad's work well enough to say whether "The Black Telephone" is a staying-in-the-wheelhouse collection or a radical-departure collection, but I will say that (a) Trinidad's work is distinctive and (b) I like it. He combines elements I never would have expected to be combined: a passion for Sylvia Plath with a passion for Patty Duke, for instance, or thirty-four haiku based on episodes of the 1960s television series Peyton Place, or a list in the style of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book that includes "The voice of Dusty Springfield." . Much of the work is based on and quite candid about his own memories and experiences ("Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "AIDS Series"), but we also get formal experiments like an idiosyncratic erasure poem based entirely on phrases Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.

Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Sharon Tate appear, as does Dick Fisk (a gay porn star); steering by those stars, we know we are in queer baby boomer male waters, but there are more than enough surprises to keep things interesting. Had James Schuyler been born thirty years later than he actually was, he might have written not unlike Trinidad.

Timothy Egan, _A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them_

READING THE WORST Hard Time, Egan's book about the Dust Bowl, was a personal landmark for me; my parents grew up in the Dust Bowl, and Egan's book gave me a clearer idea than I had ever gotten before, even from their own stories, of what their childhood had been like.

This book did not have the same personal relevance for me, but considering it was about events of about one hundred years ago, it felt painfully relevant to our moment. 

The Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist vigilante outfit of the Reconstruction years, was revived in 1915 in the wake of D. W. Griffiths' popular and influential film Birth of a Nation (which, among other things, celebrated the exploits of the Reconstruction era Klan). By the mid-1920s, stoked by a variety of anxieties about "others" (Blacks moving north, Jews, Catholics, women's suffrage), membership had exploded, and the Klan had started to flex some serious political muscle.

Egan focuses on Indiana, where a particularly energetic Klan organizer and demagogue, D. C. Stephenson, had such a talent for provoking and channeling the fear and ressentiment of midwestern white Protestants that Indiana's local law enforcement, municipal government, courts, and state legislature were all crawling with Klan members. Stephenson saw himself, with some justification, as the most powerful man in the state. He could even tell the governor what to do.

Besides being a talented organizer and effective speaker, Stephenson was a serial rapist and sexual abuser, crimes he could commit with a degree of impunity, given his connections. However, Madge Oberholtzer, a woman he kidnapped, raped, and assaulted, lived long enough (despite poisoning herself in desperation) to  tell her story. Her parents, friends, and lawyers were foresighted enough to have her deathbed testimony witnessed and notarized, and that testimony was ruled admissible in the prosecution of Stephenson for what he did to her. In a verdict that surprised the whole country, he was convicted.

Because Egan focuses so closely on two characters, Stephenson the Caligula wannabe and the brave though grievously injured Madge, I kept thinking what a natural candidate for a film or television series A Fever in the Heartland is. I was thinking even more, though, of how much D. C. Stephenson--arrogant, entitled, vicious, dishonest, drunk on his own power, seemingly beyond the reach of the law--reminded me  of a certain DJT, and what a sweet and fitting thing it was that justice at long last caught up with him.

Robert Duncan, _The Years as Catches_

I SPOTTED THIS on a table at Third Mind Books in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought--what have we here? I had always thought (a) that The Opening of the Field (1960) was Duncan's first collection of poetry and (b) that the five collections of his poems I had read were the whole shebang. Wrong on both counts, as I should have guessed, since Duncan was 41 when Opening of the Field came out and was obviously no beginner.

The Years as Catches was published by Oyez, located in Berkeley,  in 1966, and reprints poems that appeared in Heavenly City, Earthly City, published by Bern Porter in 1947, and Selected Poems, published by City Lights in 1959.  These count as rare books now--Heavenly City, Earthly City is available on Abebooks at prices ranging from $100 to $2500 and Selected Poems (Pocket Poets #10) for from $40 to $80, so I feel reconciled to having spent $40 on this, even though I could have purchased it for half that on Abebooks. Live and learn, or so one hopes.

I was hoping to glean some information about Duncan's decision to reprint these earlier poems from Lisa Jarnot's biography, but was thwarted by there being no entry for either  The Years as Catches or Heavenly City, Earthly City in her index. This may just be a question of careless indexing, but what a pain in the tush.

The poems? Right, the poems. My main impression was that Duncan, in  these poems, had not yet started sounding like Duncan. He had obviously been reading Eliot and Pound and like them liked to stir in some 16th and 17th century vocabulary and sentence construction when writing of contemporary phenomena: 

                     Already ere I wake

I hear that sound. Shout & fill the air with sirens.

No sound that you can make for war or human misery

can meet that sound nor cover it. No waste you wrake

upon the body, no ravaging of mind nor spirit can

make deaf nor blind nor insensate.

That is from the poem "The Years as Catches," written in 1942 and addressing (I think) the disaster of the Second World War in the vein of an older poetic idiom, as we might say Eliot's "East Coker" does. 

When we get to the 1946 poems, though, the poems start sounding less like Duncan's models and more like Duncan, especially those in which he is open about his sexuality. The  love poem "Heavenly City, Earthly City" in particular, while sounding a little like Shelley at times (it reminded me of "Epipsychidion"), looks forward to Duncan's distinctive marriage of a Romantic idiom to a Modernist one.

Nettie Jones, _Fish Tales_

THIS 1983 NOVEL was recently re-published, which is how I heard of it. It's a crazy ride. 

The narrator is a woman named Lewis, and as that detail suggests, fluidity prevails. The novel is set in Detroit and New York City, but we seem to be not so much moving between the two settings as to be now in one and now the other, without any explicit indication that Lewis has relocated. Similarly, although the novel seems set in the mid-to-late 1970s and occasionally the early 1980s, the narrative does not seem to be in strict chronological order, as mercurial in time as it is in space.. Sometimes we learn this our that character's eye color or skin tone, but their ethnicities generally go unspecified, and we rarely get anyone's last name. The characters' genders and sexualities likewise wander where they will, and the erotic is never far away.

In other words, for a forty-year-old novel, it feels very congruent with contemporary sensibilities. To me, it seemed comparable to Michelle Tea or Dodie Bellamy, but wilder, more operatic, with a sort of 1970s anarchic streak reminiscent of writers like Robert Coover, John Barth or Donald Barthelme. 

Part Two ("Connect"), about Lewis's relationship with a brilliant and well-connected quadriplegic named Brook, feels somewhat more linear than Part One ("Disconnect'), but it's still wild, an emotional roller coaster if you can imagine a roller coaster that operates in five or six dimensions rather than the usual three.

Olga Tokarczuk, _Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead_

 I GUESS THIS is a murder mystery...that is, some people are murdered, and we find out near the end of the novel who murdered them...fortunately, though, we the readers get a lot more than the mystery's solution to think about--to wit, we get the novel's narrator and main character, Janina Duszejko, whose voice and presence Tokarczuk conjures up with preternatural salience and clarity. 

Janina--whose name it feels awkward to use, since she herself does not much care for it--has a variety of appealing traits: self-sufficiency, an appreciation of William Blake (whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell the title quotes), affinity with the natural world, and a willingness to call authority to account.

One expects Big Ideas and Grand Themes when reading a Nobel laureate. I'm not sure this novel has any big ideas, but it certainly speaks to the hope that there is some way to overturn patriarchy and its arrogance and entitlement. For 2025, that feels like plenty. 

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, _The Passenger_, trans. Philip Boehm

 BOSCHWITZ, A GERMAN Jew, got out of Germany in 1935, not long after the Nuremberg laws were passed, so he did not experience firsthand the post-Kristallnacht weeks of roundups, camps, and desperate attempts to flee in late 1938...this novel is so vivid and terrifying, though, that one would swear he did experience them. 

The novel's main character, Otto Silbermann, is a successful German Jewish businessman, a World War I combat vet, and married to a gentile, but none of that is doing him the least bit of good as he tries again and again to get out of Germany before he is hauled off. He takes train after train, back and forth across the country, clutching a briefcase full of cash, not knowing whom he can trust or which encounter with a petty official might be his last as a free man. He even attempts to cross into Belgium on foot, at night...to no avail.

The modifier "Kafkaesque" keeps coming to mind, given the central European setting, the nightmare-like circularity and repetition, and the pervasive hostility and suspicion Silbermann has to navigate around. But then one recalls it's Germany, it's 1938, and there is nothing either fantastical or allegorical about the accelerating dwindling of Silbermann's chances of getting out.

The novel's most terrifying aspect is that the people Silbermann deals with gradually stop seeing him as really human at all. He is becoming Agamben's homo sacer. 

Apparently the novel was published in the USA as early as 1939 and in the UK in 1940 without attracting much attention. Hats off to all involved in its rediscovery and republication.

Eduardo Galeano, _Memory of Fire: Faces and Masks_, trans. Cedric Belfrage

TRYING TO KEEP up my South American literature momentum after Zama and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, I picked up the second volume of Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy, which I had been vaguely intending to get to ever since I read the first volume back in...well, let's just say it was a while ago.

I'm not sure the English translation of Memory of Fire is still in print, although apparently digital versions are available. It's brilliant. Imagine a history of the Western Hemisphere, focusing mainly on Central and South America, in three volumes, each volume a thousand close-printed pages. Then imagine each of those 1000-page volumes trimmed down to its most vivid vignettes, personalities, and episodes, the details and events likeliest to stick in your memory, so you have three books of about 250 pages apiece. That would give you something like Memory of Fire. 

The first volume, Genesis, covers the Americas from their pre-historic dawn up to the end of the 17th century, and the second, Faces and Masks, covers the 18th and 19th centuries. Galeano adopts a leftist perspective, so the 18th century is mainly about ruthless colonial exploitation and enslavement, the 19th century mainly about  efforts at independence and liberation that end up largely benefitting the better-off, but he generally avoids being explicitly political, instead letting the stories speak for themselves. Therein lies the genius of the book. Brilliant vignette follows brilliant vignette without any big conclusions being drawn or morals pointed out, but the overall message is impossible to miss.

Along the way we meet quite a few figures comparable to di Benedetto's Zama and Machado de Assis's Brás Cubas, parasites parading their entitlement. We also meet some of the people who were pushing back and working for change--and I expect we will meet a few more of those in the trilogy's third volume, on the 20th century: Century of the Wind.