Diana Khoi Nguyen, _Ghost Of_

A DEBUT POETRY volume, and a wrenching one. Nguyen is the oldest of three children;  her brother, the youngest, died by suicide. Some time before that, he "cut out only his face from every photograph in the hall, carefully slipping each frame back into position."

Interspersed throughout the volume are five poems, each titled "Triptych," that juxtapose the scissored family photo with one poem typeset to fit the gap left by the scissored-out brother, and a second poem typeset to match the dimensions of the photo, but with white space for the gap in the surviving image.

Also interspersed are five poems titled "Gyotaku," the name of a traditional Japanese printmaking method, involving the inking of a real fish. In these poems, the gap-shaped poem is turned into--as it were--a rubber stamp, and used to create a graphic design on the facing page.

Arranged around these ten poems are another fifteen more conventional ones, mainly about the family.

Simple enough to describe the organization of the book, but not so easy to describe its effect.

Imagine that Laertes, rather than Ophelia, had become psychologically estranged and taken his own life. Ophelia is left to mourn--which she does not by leaping into graves and threatening violence, but by writing poems--poems that try to trace with a slow finger the infinitely complicated knot of her relationship with her brother, its particular intimacies and silences, a relationship that from beginning to end took place in the deep shadow cast by the traumas their parents lived through.

As I said at the outset, wrenching.

Lucy Ellmann, _Ducks, Newburyport_, interim report

I AM JUST short of halfway through with this--am on p. 480--but feel like registering my surprise at the quotation from the Book Prize Jury citation to be found on the front cover of my edition of the book: "like nothing you've ever read before." Can it actually be the case that no one on a Booker Prize Jury had read Ulysses?

Lucy Ellmann I imagine has, being Richard's daughter, and I daresay anyone who has read Joyce's novel will, shortly after commencing Ducks, Newburyport, have at least a passing thought about Molly Bloom. A long, unspooling sentence in a female consciousness, reflecting on anything and everything but continually reverting to family, the home, the intimately personal...how can that not put you in mind of Molly Bloom?

Yes, there are plenty of differences between Molly and Ellmann's narrator, plenty of differences between early 20th century Dublin and early 21st century Ohio, and yes, it does make a difference that Joyce was male and Ellmann is female . I am only saying that we may as well acknowledge that Ellmann's novel has a crucial predecessor text.

I would never say that takes anything away from Ellmann's accomplishment, though. This is an excellent book. It will take me a while to finish--I need a few days between deep dives, I am finding--but it is worthy of its lineage, and you can't say that of every text influenced by Joyce.

Samantha Schweblin, _Fever Dream_, trans. Megan McDowell

THIS WAS TAUT and gripping, as reviewers would say, but I'm not sure what happened, exactly.

The story is set somewhere in the countryside. Amanda and her husband and their three-year-old, Nina, are at a vacation rental. Carla lives in the neighborhood of the rental; her husband raises racehorses, and they have a young son, David, who might be six.

The whole novel is a conversation between Amanda and David about the events of the last few days.

And what are those events?

There may be powerful toxins in the local streams. David was not long ago exposed to them. His mother, Carla, took the extraordinary step of taking him to a local wise woman/bruja, who put David's soul in someone else's body, temporarily, while the effects of the poisons worked their way out. Then David's soul was returned to his body. But he hasn't been the same since. Or so it seems too Carla.

Nina and Amanda were perhaps both exposed to those same toxins. Should the wise woman/bruja be brought in to do the soul-transfer again? Or should Amanda try to get her to the city? Is Amanda herself on the point of death?

I'm not sure, to tell you the truth, what happens to Amanda or Nina, or whether what supposedly happened to David really happened, or even whether Amanda is really talking to David or just hallucinating the whole thing.

The novel does play skillfully on some powerful species of fear, though--environmental toxins, people with occult powers, the vulnerability of one's children. It was certainly scary, though stingy with explanations.

Curzio Malaparte, _Kaputt_, trans. Cesare Foligno

MALAPARTE (WHOSE BIRTH name was Kurt Erich Suckert--German father, Italian mother) was in on the ground floor of Fascism, participating in Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. Apparently he was a maverick Fascist, though, frequently getting on the wrong side of Mussolini, even going to prison a time or two. His friendship with Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, seems to have saved him from worse. (Under the circumstances, you would think Ciano would come off in this book a lot better than he does, where he seems like a big-headed womanizing buffoon.)

Malaparte spent a lot of World War II traveling in Europe as a journalist for the Corriere della Sera, and Kaputt is based on what he saw--or might have seen, or perhaps mainly imagined--in Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Finland, Germany. Reportage and fiction are intertwined in the book, and no one is altogether positive which episodes he witnessed and which he conjured up.

Did he really see dead horses in a frozen lake, "where, during the winter, the heads of the horses gripped by the ice had emerged above the glistening crust of the ice, and where a little of their jaded odor still lingered in the damp air of the night"?

Did he really see Himmler in a sauna? "Around his flabby breasts grow two little circles of hair, two halos of blond hair; perspiration gushed like milk from his nipples."

Did he really spend time in a military brothel in which young Jewish women were forced to work, knowing that their next stop, once the soldiers tired of them, would be the death camps?

Did he really see a cattle car filled with the corpses of Romanian Jews?

No one knows, basically, but Kaputt, mostly written before the war ended, is the grandaddy of the fictions since in which the Eastern front of the war is revealed as a 24/7 Boschian nightmare: Danilo Kîs's Tomb for Boris Davidovich, William Vollmann's Central Europe, Jonathan Littell's Les bienveillantes. And Malaparte is one amazing writer.

Miriam Toews, _Women Talking_

SHORT AND POWERFUL. Toews's novel is based on actual events in a small, isolated Mennonite community in Bolivia. Women were awaking some mornings to find themselves battered and groggy. Their community leader told them Satan was punishing them, but it turned some men in the community were knocking them out at night with animal tranquilizers in order to rape them. Grim.

Toews's novel is set up as the transcript of a series of meetings held by women in a fictional small South American Mennonite community after they learn that they have been molested in just the way described above. Should they accept things as they are? Should they fight? Should they leave?

The women are present at this meeting because they have already decided they cannot accept things as they are. How can they fight, though, since the men have a monopoly on the community's resources? But can they leave? They can neither read nor write, and know almost nothing of the world outside their community. And the Bible commands submission to their husbands--there's that, too.

It takes them a while to sort this out. As they do, Toews arranges their discussion so that we get a vivid sense of each woman and of the community's history and values.

There's an interesting word in koiné Greek--katargein--that Paul uses to describe the Christian community's relationship to Jewish law. (In Luther's translation of Paul, he used the word aufheben, which on to have its own rich history with Hegel.) The word means an overthrowing, an emptying out, a negation. Paul seems to be suggesting something subtler, more elusive, but crucial--not simple rejection and replacement of the law, but an overcoming of the law that somehow includes the law, in a transformed sense.

The women of Women Talking have a stark choice: a livable life for themselves and (even more urgently) their daughters, versus maintaining their faith. They cannot imagine continuing to lead the life the men have imposed on them. But they cannot imagine leaving their faith, either--it is almost literally all they know. Is there a way of re-understanding that faith? Can the faith transcend itself, overcome itself in a way that transforms itself?

Toews's novel is set in a barn and is nothing but earnest conversation, but the stakes are gigantic.

Olga Tokarczuk, _Flights_, trans. Jennifer Croft

FLIGHTS IS A novel, but one could imagine it a collection of short stories, a collection that varies widely in character and setting but tightly coheres thematically. What makes it feel like a novel is that sandwiched between the 20-30 page "short stories" are dozens of vignettes drawn from observations and reflections from the author's travels, observations and reflections that provide a kind of foil for the themes of the fictions. The structure reminded me a lot of major-phase Kundera (Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Unbearable Lightness of Being). Like Kundera, Tokarczuk toggles very adeptly from the essayistic to the fictional to create a sturdy double helix out of her two strands.

Again like Kundera, Tokarczuk gives the book a philosophical center--one reminiscent of Unbearable Lightness, actually, since it addresses the question of whether life is best lived by seeking a kind of gravity or permanence--staying put, preserving, repeating, and so on--or rather by flight, getting out, packing light, risking the new and unfamiliar.

Tokarczuk seems to lean towards the "getting out" answer. The recurring image for achieving stability is mummification, suggesting that permanence requires some form of death. (Kundera might have made the contest more evenly matched.)

It's a beautiful book, nonetheless. The pace is quick, since many of the first-person passages are very short, but it takes a while for the big picture to emerge, mosaic-like, from the many little bits and pieces we are presented with. Once it does, though, we are in high-flying territory. Here is one striking passage, from one of the more developed and clearly fictional episodes. A woman has run away from her abusive husband, abandoning her son, to live homeless in a nearby city. A mysterious figure whispers this to her:

"For anything that has a stable place in this world--every country, church, every human government, everything that has preserved a form in this hell--is at his [i.e., the Antichrist's] command. Everything that is defined, that spans from here to there, that fits into a framework, is written down in registers, numbered, testified to, sworn to, everything collected, displayed, labeled. [...] Get out of here, go far away, beyond  the reach of his breath, beyond his cables and wires and antennas and waves, resist the measurements of his sensitive instruments."

Robert Lowell, _The Dolphin_

READING A HANDFUL of reviews of The Dolphin Letters convinced me that I really do not want to read through The Dolphin Letters, but it did whet my curiosity sufficiently to look again at The Dolphin, which I had last read back in the 1980s, during a period when I was getting a lot of random reading done in an effort to avoid working on my dissertation.

The Dolphin--all sonnets, like Lowell's Notebook--reflects the period when Lowell abruptly left his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Hardwick and his young daughter Harriet for an Englishwoman, the 14-years-younger Lady Caroline Blackwood, formerly married to the painter Lucien Freud.

As all the reviews of The Dolphin Letters note, in many of these sonnets Lowell took the enormous liberty of quoting from Hardwick's letters to him--sometimes entire poems are quotations from the letters--and the even more enormous liberty of changing Hardwick's wording.

All the reviews often mention Elizabeth Bishop's advice to Lowell after she saw the manuscript, which was, essentially, don't publish: "Art just isn't worth that much." Not worth, that is, the pain publication would inevitably bring Hardwick and their daughter. Lowell went ahead. The book did not get great reviews, I gather, nor much subsequent acclaim, so far as I can tell.

I did not much care for it much myself, the first time I read it. This time, I'm not sure why, I found myself liking it. I'm not as bothered by Lowell's frequent obscurity as I used to be, I think. I think too that when I first read it, I was hoping to find some sense that he understood what he was up to, that there was some sort of justification or rationale in his own mind, at least. He does not have one, really. He does not understand his actions any better than anyone else does. But now, forty years on for me, I'm less puzzled over people not knowing what the sweet fuck they think they're doing.

Something that struck me as disturbing at the time, but now fascinates: all experience happens to Lowell as already a sonnet. Falling in love, guilt, joys of fatherhood, woes of fatherhood, remembering something, reading something--whatever it is, it immediately assembles itself, in Lowell, as fourteen blank verse lines. That seemed warped and weird to me in the 1980s, but now it strikes me as the hallmark of a lifelong craftsman.

The issue of cruelty to Hardwick lingers, true. But she could have trained the flamethrowers on him in Sleepless Nights and didn't, so I guess she forgave him in some way.