Nathalie Léger, _The White Dress_, translated by Natasha Lehrer

 THE WHITE DRESS is the third in a trilogy of prose portraits of women artists. The first two--Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden (LLL 12/24/2021 and 4/14/2022)--bear witness to delayed but fulfilled justice or vindication, since the Countess of Castiglione's photography project and Barbara Loden's 1970 film Wanda, disregarded and undervalued at the time of their making, did eventually find audiences and recognition. The White Dress tells a more sobering story.

Pippa Bacca was an Italian performance artist who, in 2008, was video-recording herself hitch-hiking around Europe and the Mediterranean in a wedding dress, with the goal of promoting world peace. The project was brutally ended when she was raped and murdered by a man who picked her up in Turkey (who was eventually caught because he kept and used the camera, with Bacca's footage still on it). 

Braided with this story is that of Léger's parents' marriage--a story not as terrible as Bacca's, but grim enough, with Léger's father seemingly set on humiliating and wounding his wife and daughter with his flagrant infidelities. This story has previously appeared in the trilogy, in Exposition, but here Léger pays particular attention to how marriage (the white dress) damaged her mother's life. 

Decidedly downbeat, then, and for that reason an unexpected way to end a trilogy about women artists whose work is brought back to life thanks to archival research. Or is the book suggesting something like that will happen in Bacca's case? A painful but worthwhile read.

Anne Dufourmantelle, _Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living_, trans. Katherine Payne and Vincent Salle

THE ORIGINAL FRENCH version of this book, Puissance de la douceur, was published in 2013; when this translation appeared in 2018, Dufourmantelle, only 54, had already died. Cancer or car accident, I guessed, but it turns out she died while trying to save two children from drowning in the Mediterranean. How many philosophers, or intellectuals in general, have died trying to save another's life? It's a short list, I expect.

Power of Gentleness reminded me of Sianne Ngai's Our Aesthetic Categories. The history of aesthetics largely involves philosophers wrestling with what "beauty" is, or "the sublime," but Ngai upended things and started new conversations by trying to understand the "cute," the "interesting," the "zany." Similarly, while many philosophers have thought about power and duty and necessity, Dufourmantelle started a new conversation by taking up "gentleness." Or douceur--her translators point out in a prefatory note that the French word covers a different semantic landscape than the English word does, as douceur can refer to sweetness and softness as well as mildness or tenderness.

The book is in thirty-six chapters, short essays of two or three pages--the whole book is scarcely over a hundred pages in the Fordham University press edition--all working through the apparent paradox of the title. We tend to associate power with force, but refraining from force also makes things happen. Dufourmantelle makes some unsurprising points along these lines--for instance, about Tolstoy and Gandhi--but also some very surprising ones--for instance, about animals: "So close to animality that it sometimes merges with it, gentleness is experienced to the point of making possible the hypothesis of an instinct that it would call its own." A strange idea--nature, red in  tooth and claw, has a gentleness instinct? But we do see animals being gentle with each other, and where does that come from? Not from having taken an ethics course.

Dufourmantelle offers some important caveats. Gentleness ought not to be confused with "mawkishness," and we should keep in mind that it can be "bastardized into silliness." She notes that "gentleness does not belong only to the good." But we need what it makes possible, as she particularly emphasizes in the section "Justice and Forgiveness" and the final section, "A Gentle Revolution."

I was especially struck by this, in the section titled "Childhood":

We would not survive childhood without gentleness because everything about childhood is so exposed, hyperacute, in a way violent and raw, that gentleness is its absolute prerequisite.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed., _Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America_

 I SPOTTED THIS in the window of Indigo Bridge Bookstore (rest in power, Indigo Bridge!) last March, and a quick scan of the table of contents--Corey Robin! Pankaj Mishra! Robert Paxton!--ensured that I paid my $28.99, plus sales tax, within the next three minutes.

I am a pushover for this sort of thing. I am also reading David Corn's American Psychosis and John Ganz's When the Clock Broke, as well as dispatches from the front lines by Rick Perlstein, Fintan O'Toole, Ezra Klein...I can't leave this sort of thing alone.

Steinmetz-Jenkins gathers a number of interesting takes on the question of whether comparisons of Trumpism to fascism are valid. Some answer yes, some answer no; Robert Paxton answered "no" before January 6 and "yes" afterward. Everyone has something interesting to say. For me, besides the pieces by Robin, Mishra, and Paxton, the perspectives of Sarah Churchwell, Udi Greenberg, Jason Stanley, and Kathleen Belew were especially illuminating.

"No" answers typically see some crucial difference between 1930s model and what Trump (or Modi, or Orban, or Meloni) is pushing. Churchwell has a succinct riposte: 

American fascist energies today are different from 1930s European fascism, but that doesn't mean they're not fascist; it means they're not European and it's not the 1930s.

So, no uniforms, no fulminating about the USSR, no rallies staged  by Albert Speer or films made by Leni Reifenstahl...but plenty of white supremacy, plenty of willingness to garrote majority rule and subvert constitutions, plenty of toxic masculinity, plenty of threatened and actual violence.

Steinmetz-Jenkins opens up the question helpfully with (1) a "Global Perspectives" section that reminds us the phenomenon is by no means confined to the United States and (2) a "Classic Texts" section with attempts by Reinhold Niebuhr, Leon Trotsky, and Hannah Arendt to understand 1930s fascism as it was occurring.  But, what, no Georges Bataille?

Kaveh Akbar, _Martyr!_

WHEN POETS WRITE novels, I worry about the potential loss to poetry, but the novels so often turn out to be excellent that I ought to quit carping and be grateful. Martyr! is another occasion for such gratitude.

Cyrus Shams, the central character in the novel, is the American-raised son of Iraqi parents, both of whom have died before the main action of the novel begins. His mother has died in a particularly terrible fashion, as a passenger in an airliner mistakenly shot down by the American military. I don’t know whether anything of the sort happened to Akbar’s parents—probably not—but Cyrus does share with his author not only his ethnicity but also an Indiana alma mater, a history of substance addiction, and an ambition to write.

Cyrus is drawn to big questions, e.g., is there a God? On the novel’s first page, he asks God for a sign, any sign, maybe just make the lights flicker…and then the lights do flicker. A sign? Crazy coincidence? Akbar had me hooked right there.

Cyrus also wonders what makes for a meaningful death, which has led to his drafting his poetry collection, Book of Martyrs, excerpts from which appear in the novel. This project in turn has led him to discover Orkideh, a terminally-ill conceptual artist whose last project involves having conversations with strangers about dying. To meet Orkideh and participate in the project, Cyrus and his friend and lover Zee make their way to New York City.

For me, the main pull of the novel was its writing, consistently witty, graceful, aware, smart, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but it has a deepening story as well in the rapid evolution of Cyrus’s relationship with Orkideh and the stress thus created in his relationship with Zee. A major revelation looms, which of course I will not reveal here, and a major epiphany, in which Akbar pulls out all the stops in his prose style, with stunning effectiveness.

In his acknowledgements, Akbar thanks Tommy Orange, “bandmate, maestro.” Are Akbar and Tommy Orange in a band? Time for a Spotify search. But what is the band’s name?

Jane Bowles, _Plain Pleasures_

 IN ADDITION TO the novel Two Serious Ladies (see LLL for May 10, 2024) and the play In the Summer House, Jane Bowles published this volume of short stories. It appeared in 1966. 

Anyone who enjoyed Two Serious Ladies would enjoy the short stories as well, I predict. They are in the same dry, deadpan voice, and the two longest of the stories, each about forty pages, strike one as near kin to Bowles’s 1943 novel. “A Guatemalan Idyll” seems to take place within a stone’s throw of wherever Mrs. Copperfield is in the second chapter of Two Serious Ladies, and “Camp Cataract” seems like the kind of place Christina Goering might someday turn up. 

In both “A Guatemalan Idyll” and “Camp Cataract” a female protagonist is mounting a serious effort to put some distance between herself and her family or to get out of the United States or both, and the same impulse appears in some of the other stories (e.g., “A Stick of Green Candy”). Perhaps the protagonists have lesbian inclinations that they realize cannot even be acknowledged or articulated, much less acted upon, within the confines of the family circle or the boundaries of the United States—hence the urgency of getting the hell out, if they can. But neither could those same inclinations be acknowledged or articulated in above-ground publication in the 1940s and 1950s, and this Great Looming Unsayable lends an enigmatic gravity to these stories that might otherwise seem like tales of shabby-genteel eccentrics. Bowles’s protagonists may give the impression of being scatter-brained and affected, but one also senses they are straining every nerve to save their own lives.

Larry Levis, _The Afterlife_

 ENOUGH STRAY MENTIONS of Larry Levis were swimming into my ken (e.g., by Mathias Svalina) that I was starting to think, hmm, I really should read some Larry Levis, and after reading this collection (the second of the five volumes he published in his lifetime, 1946-1996) I am contemplating a deep dive.

Levis tends to be both precise and mysterious, which appeals to me:

Applying to Heavy Equipment School
I marched farther into the Great Plains
And refused to come out.
I threw up a few scaffolds of disinterest.
Around me in  the fields, the hogs grunted
And lay on their sides. 

His figurative language continually surprises ("At night I lie still, like Bolivia," or those "scaffolds of disinterest"), as does his imagery ("And so I think of the darkness inside the horn, / How no one's breath has been able / To push it out yet [...]"). 

What appealed to me most is that this is a poetry of desolation that somehow consoles. Seems impossible, but there it is--in this respect a bit like the poetry of Mr. Svalina himself. "Signs" is a poem I expect to return to. Two of its four stanzas:

And this evening in the garden
I find the winter
inside a snail shell, rigid and
cool, a little stubborn temple,
its one visitor gone. 

[...] 

I stay up late listening.
My feet tap the floor,
they begin a tiny dance
which will outlive me.
They turn away from this poem.
It is almost Spring.

Ange Mlinko, _Distant Mandate_

 DOES STEPHANIE BURT'S descriptor from the late 1990s, "elliptical poetry," still have any currency? I think it would apply to this volume (from 2017) and to Mlinko's work more generally. The real subject of the poem often seems to be not quite there in the poem, but a bit off to side, in the peripheral vision of the poem, vanishing when looked at directly.

Mlinko's rhyming may have something to do with the I'm-not-there of her poems' (let's call it) representational aspect, as her rhymes have a Muldoonian dazzle capable of upstaging whatever the poem's looming question or agon is: isotope/trope, bronchitis/fight this, obol/scroll. Then we have the resourcefulness of her sentence structures, the unpacking of which offers delight even when you are not sure exactly what is being presented:

A replica factory in this pastoral
crushes fake beans
with brushed steel, utterly simulacral;
branded Halloweens
emerge from this maw, as if the plain fact
of horror streams
from a roller coaster, digestive tract
for swallowed screams.

Amid the dazzle, though, I did find myself wondering whether there had been some strain in Mlinko's marriage, especially in "Decision Theory," "Marriage as Baroque Music," "Knot Garden," and two longer poems, "'They That Dally Nicely with Words May Quickly Make Them Wanton'" and "Epic." 

A closing note from Mlinko states that "The myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, and Cupid and Psyche, subtend the book." Orpheus, we could say, was a husband who did not have enough faith in his wife, hence his looking back to see whether she was following; Psyche, on  the other hand, was a wife who did not have enough faith in her husband, hence her following her sisters' admonitions and resorting to the lamp. The two myths make for a nice matched set. Psyche does persevere to a happy ending, though, so I can hope Mlinko and her spouse did as well...if that is even what the book is about.