The Video Image Loometh: A scene with Karl Bury and Thomas Derrah in Clifford Odets's Paradise Lost at the American Repertory Theater. Photo credit: Marcus Stern

Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond. Directed by Kenny Leon. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company in collaboration with the Arena Stage at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, through March 28.

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets. Directed by Daniel Fish. Staged by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, MA, through March 20.

The Book of Grace by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by James Macdonald. At the Public Theater, New York, NY, through April 4.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Doing away with a “painted box set” does not necessarily free up our theater artists to provide compelling “visible and audible expression” of the cultural and political spirit of the present day.

In fact, given the depressing dependence on multimedia folderol in both The Book of Grace by Suzan-Lori Parks and director Daniel Fish’s tricked up production of Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost at the American Repertory Theater (ART), the evidence runs in the opposite direction.

The addition of technology seems to ratchet up a compensatory dramatic hysteria, pumping up a production’s urge to float a bloated Important Message. The savvy modesty of Stick Fly’s comic meditation on race and class, presented in a non-videoized but well-designed set, comes as a funny, perceptive, and reassuring testament to the values of the provisional, on stage and off.

Current attempts to turn the stage into a giant TV screen seem to be part of an effort to reassure theatergoers that theater can be morphed into a new-fangled CGI movie (or into a disco party, The Donkey Show, or into an impressive arts installation, Sleep No More, earlier ART productions under the new “show ‘em its not just theater” leadership of Diane Paulus). The mania for the projected image wreaks havoc on the ART’s staging of Paradise Lost, an Odets epic that had a debilitating case of The Big Statement when it hit Broadway in 1935.

After the critical success of the one-act Waiting for Lefty, Odets was pushed to write more and more ambitious plays, but he lacks the talent for sustained dramatic construction—the lumpy, speechifying Paradise Lost earned Odets his first round of negative reviews, helping to send him away from the theater to Hollywood, where his talent for juicy dialogue and simmering visions of personal and public betrayal fit well (sometimes brilliantly, as in “Sweet Smell of Success”) into pre-fab movie formulas.

Paradise Lost is the de-evolutionary tale of a middle-class, American family, the Gordons. The Depression cleans out its bank account and eventually its home. On the way down, the Gordons grapple with the loss of life as well as with failed dreams of athletic success, artistic accomplishment, brotherly love, and financial security. Clara, the pragmatic wife, plays second banana to delusional merchant hubby Leo, who throughout the descent into poverty maintains his radical faith in the American Dream.

David Chandler, T. Ryder Smith, Jonathan Epstein and giant video spirit in Paradise Lost. Photo: Marcus Stern.

The script’s leftist politics generally serve as talky window dressing: when Odets confronts idealistic Leo with real world complications, such as how to provide better working conditions for the mistreated workers in his shop (we are asked to believe the old line that he didn’t know about the exploitation), the matter is dropped. But that is Odets’s scattershot approach throughout—even the major villain of the piece hasn’t the integrity of his own greed. Odets has him come on guilt-ridden at the end, offering the Gordons blood money just so the family, without a penny to its name, can honorably shame him.

Not content with that feel-good moment, the playwright struggles to provide a mega-inspirational final message: Leo’s oracular response to the nihilistic dressing down of a tramp Marxist. As amusing as it is to hear a ringing defense of Ralph Waldo Emerson (!) in the face of a communist lambasting, the mishmash suggests that the Gordons, despite Odets’s speeches to the contrary, remain out of touch with reality.

The playwright’s jump to Hollywood suggests that he saw the real value of escapism: critic George Jean Nathan opined that Leo delivers “such a lush panegyric to the future bliss of mankind as makes the ordinary happy ending of the commercial Broadway drama look like the finish of Othello.”

Still, Paradise Lost offers some of the crackling energy and slangy dialogue that makes even Odets in ersatz-Chekhovian mode fun to sit through. And the ART production will most likely be the only professional staging of the large cast Paradise Lost we will have the opportunity to see. But, obsessed with making sure the audience sees the “relevance” of the play, director Fish ladles on the giant video shots, TV commercials, hand-held mikes, and electric pianos. The result of the modern airbrushing is to make the play seem more, not less, dated. The abstract set is so barren that it defeats the message of the play: the Gordons have nothing to lose as they sink into terminal debt.

The performances feel under done and earnest, the cast members making too little hay of the roller-coaster rhythms in Odets’s language, the kitschy patter of desires thwarted and dreams denied. The dramatist’s characters may be lost and broken, but their tongues are lively. T. Ryder Smith provides a standout turn as Mr. May, a professional arsonist who offers to set fire to Gordon’s shop for the insurance money—the performer offers a creepily conversational note of unrepentant evil, no preaching but a plain old invitation to despicable action. Jonathan Epstein offers some corrosive moments of capitalist self-hatred as the bedeviled Sam Katz, Leo’s tortured business partner.

The Book of Grace

You don’t have to have lived in the 1930s to write a play that could have crawled out of the didactic depths of the era. Receiving its world premiere at New York’s Public Theater, The Book of Grace is a bewildering paradox—Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks takes on a fascinating topic, the roots of domestic terrorism, but the script’s allegorical world, populated by cartoony victims and victimizers, turns out to be just as dated as Odets’s soapbox universe, sans philosophical Marxists. Another play sporting a Big Statement collapses under its own portentous weight.

Actress Elizabeth Marvel plays the title character in The Book of Grace. Photo: Walter McBride

Set in South Texas, the simple-minded yarn revolves around the domestic arrangements of a border patrol guard, imaginatively named Vet, who is about to receive a medal for his gung-ho success at keeping illegal aliens out of the U.S. Vet conforms to just about every right-wing brute cliché: he’s xenophobic, violent, narcissistic, authoritarian, and homicidal. Vet abuses his hapless saint of a wife, Grace (a hole in the backyard patiently awaits her dead body once she crosses him once too often) and he believes Buddy, his son (whom he sexually molested, naturally) from his first marriage to be a bad seed. Meanwhile, the artsy Grace is forced to hide under the living room rug her “Book of Grace,” a collection of candied and cutesy observations, down home stories, and opinions, including a shout-out to Barack Obama. The hubby from Hell does not approve of self-expression.

Buddy comes home after a decade-long absence and, along with trying to curry favor with a suspicious dad, swears (often) that he will have his vengeance. Since Grace and Buddy hook-up carnally on the couch the moment they meet, the inevitability of an explosion is guaranteed. Buddy, who soon nicknames himself Snake after his father, relates his terror plans to a video camera, his anger springing less from political perfidy or the crushing tax burden (though he quotes the U.S. Constitution a lot) than from his tortured relationship with this insane father, whom he wants to please as well as pulverize.

The ambiguity of Parks’s best plays, her lyrical manipulations of myth and the American dream, leaves the audience guessing fruitfully. The characters in The Book of Grace are one-dimensional, liberal tinker toys—will Grace survive among the murderous Snakes in the Texas grass?—so the play doesn’t work as incisive political drama or as compelling domestic saga. The symbolic fate of Grace is left in no prosaic doubt; in fact, it is hard to keep a straight face at the rabbit-out-of-a-hat resolution.

The performers reflect the ambitious fuzziness of the script, with John Doman, as Vet, left with nothing to do but preen militarily and glare with menace—he lives his job. As Grace, Elizabeth Marvel is stuck with a misguided role that calls for her to be an inspirational salt-of-the-earth dishrag. The woman is independent enough to defy Vet with her writings, yet she is unable to conceive of leaving the murderous goon and inanely optimistic that Buddy and Vet will be able to patch up their broken relationship. As Buddy, Amari Cheatom never really evokes the despairing, eruptive center of Buddy— somehow the performer has to be craven, yet threatening at the some time. Cheatom ends up being neither—his plans for domestic terrorism come off as the fruits of a temper tantrum.

Of course, director James Macdonald piles on the video with a vengeance: not only prolonged projections of Buddy’s rants into the camera, but the backdrop of Vet’s manse is a video projection that erupts into flames and other knee-jerk visual reflections of the psychological goings-on. I have admired a number of Parks’s earlier scripts, from The America Play and Topdog/Underdog to Venus, so this play and production, which I saw during previews, was dispiriting. Parks was in the audience taking notes, obviously considering making changes. I wish her luck adding heft to this thin fable of American dysfunction—she will need it.

Stick Fly

Nikkole Salter as Taylor in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of Stick Fly. Photo: Scott Suchman

Perhaps the best way to dramatize American turmoil may be to stay away from the neon-lit (or video-lit) “State of the Union” messages of Paradise Lost and The Book of Grace. Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond explores issues of race and class by reaching back to the 1930s, but she stays well away from the period’s ideals of kinship and public spiritedness espoused with such a heavy touch by Odets and Parks. Instead, she draws on the well-heeled comedy of manners of Philip Barry, cross-fertilizing it with the sprightly social combativeness of Wendy Wasserstein and the one-liner friskiness of TV sitcoms.

The result is a smart, entertaining evening that in its relaxed way does just what Hallie Falangan asks that contemporary drama should do—provide a vibrant picture of “the tempo and psychology of our time,” emphasizing some of the thornier conflicts within the African-American community. Diamond shuffles her clashing characters and their non-stop power plays and verbal confrontations with well-timed dexterity, aided by energetic performances from the cast under the sharp direction of Kenny Leon. At times the proceedings lapse into the lazy predictability of sitcom, but there’s enough observant grit to keep Stick Fly above that level most of the time.

The setting is the Martha’s Vineyard vacation home of the wealthy African-American LeVay family. Patriarch Joe is a famed neurosurgeon: he is happy with the career of one son, Flip, a successful plastic surgeon who shares his father’s libertine ways with women; he is much less happy with Kent, who has decided, after much struggle, to become a writer. It is time for the summer family gathering, and both siblings have brought home women for Mom and Dad’s approval: Kent is in love with Taylor, a feisty and brilliant woman who studies flies and, coming from a dysfunctional African-American family, has some painful issues with father figures. Flip is seeing Kimber, a confident white woman who deals with the urban underprivileged.

Matriarch LeVay never shows up at the vacation home, an absence connected with the issues raised by the maid’s daughter, who makes some shocking discoveries while taking over Mom’s duties. The parade of revelations and embarrassments, the charges and counter charges about the entitlements of money and power, the complex relationships between white and black, rich and poor, father and children, reflect a tragicomic vision of insecurity. The characters search for approval of others, but they inevitably end up falling short, sometimes sabotaging themselves in the process.

Amber Iman as Cheryl and Wendell Wright as Joe LeVay in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of Stick Fly

The play’s socio-political approach is closer to Oprah than Odets. The LeVays and visitors do their best to disguise (or to aggressively defend) their vulnerabilities. Even Joe, it turns out, sits uneasily atop the domestic pyramid. Because of their weaknesses, the inklings they have of their own bad faith, Diamond’s characters are rounded rather than squared: the playwright dramatizes the amusing connections between our strengths and weaknesses as perceived by others and ourselves. What’s more, the figures are self-consciousness enough to make fun of themselves, a self-puncturing that Odets and Parks don’t dare allow their balloon figures.

The Huntington Theatre Company (HTC) cast members generally have a heigh-ho time with the various clashing personalities and cultural perspectives, especially Nikkole Salter as Taylor, a spiky outsider who tries so hard to be liked, and Wendell W. Wright, whose Joe rises to the sardonic occasion when he asserts his narrow definition of freedom. David Gallo’s sleek set beautifully serves the needs of the play, including serving up the most wonderfully surreal library shelving I have seen on stage.

Instead of positing a bottom line diagnosis for the neediness among successful African-Americans, Stick Fly skillfully dramatizes its difficult conflicts as works-in-progress, primarily a matter for discussion and self-knowledge rather than justification for flashy proclamations of optimism or doom. Diamond’s play is a useful reminder that the stage can serve as a place for provisional insights rather than prophetic, video-sized statements.

Fun With Problems: Stories by Robert Stone, Hougton Mifflin Harcourt, 195 pages, $24

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

Though one of our prose masters, Robert Stone is less acknowledged than he ought to be. That may be because his characters repeatedly court or are caught up in dangerous situations, often pertaining to war, sexual obsession, or drugs, which may lead him to be downgraded as a genre writer.

The more likely reason for his relative obscurity is that in the United States today any but the most obviously Nobel Prize worthy writer—perhaps only Phillip Roth, since John Updike is dead—has a hard time getting full credit. Our taste tends to veer away from real writing toward colostomy bags in literary form penned by the likes of Dan Brown.

But back to Stone. Dog Soldiers (1974)—well served by the film “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” starring Nick Nolte—and Outerbridge Reach (1992) are his best novels. His memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2006), wouldn’t be a bad place to start getting to know him either since it contains many of his lifelong concerns, including Vietnam, drugs, physical-edge and psychological-edge play, ocean, irony, and varying shades of disappointment.

To give some sense of the pleasures Stone’s prose routinely delivers, I quote a sentence from Prime Green about the Adelie penguins he observed in Antarctica while serving in the U.S. navy: “They come at the persistent intruder, cackling Donald Duck-like, fowl obscenities and churning their flippers faster than the eye can see, like so many tasteful little pinball machine components. A good shot with the flipper, however, can buy them back a little respect, since they’re capable of breaking a human leg with one.”

Stone would never be drawn to the long-suffering birds ennobled by Hollywood penguin operas. It’s only the sort of gangland fowl you’d cross the street to avoid that get his attention. There is no more bird-watching in Prime Green; instead, plenty of Ken Kesey watching. Kesey’s Magic Bus, filled with Merry Pranksters “painted all colors,” came to rest, after its cross-country journey, outside Stone’s Manhattan apartment.

The name Prime Green comes from the dawns beheld in Mexico’s Manzanillo Bay by Stone, Kesey, and their crew. Such dawns, Stone writes, made “nonsense of examined life.” All caught in their “vortex” would “freeze in [their] tracks and stand to, squinting in the pain of the light, swearing, grinning. We called that light Prime Green; it was primal, primary, primo.”

The phrase “you’re on the bus or you’re off the bus” may be next to meaningless today, but those curious about what the ride might have been like will get some good clues from Stone’s prose.

Fun With Problems, Stone’s new collection of short stories— after Bear and his Daughters (1997) and Bay of Souls (2003)—wouldn’t be a bad place to start with him either. Certain things come clear about the roots of his trademark irony in the current volume. Here, for example, is Duffy, the main character of “The Archer”, as he prepares to attack his wife and her lover with, as campus legend has it, a homemade bow and arrow, while screaming: “All right, motherfuckers. Cupid is here.”

Though hell-bent on mayhem, Duffy, an artist and art historian, is not too far gone to mull over his motives. “He might have been defending his home and his wife’s heath and safety,” he reasons, half-sanely. But he “knew better in these weak piping times than to speak of honor.”

Here Stone betrays his own longing for a less weakly “piping” time, a time when honor could be invoked without embarrassment, and irony, therefore, was not such a constant and merciless commentary on our limitations.

Some stories in this collection are meant to date themselves by the prevailing intoxicants—meth, grass, alcohol, acid, freebase, crack. Dope for Stone serves much as tree rings do for a redwood fancier; they track circumstances and environment, always of historical concern to Stone. “High Wire,” for example, begins with the narrator telling us the main event of his story occurred “about midway between the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton.”

Stone is attuned to the havoc latent in masculine pride and to the hostility likely to break out for no particular reason between males of our species. One timely story records the sort of fierce dementia that can lead one man to fly his plane into an IRS building, and another to shoot up guards at the Pentagon because it is an article of faith for him that 9/11 was a crock cooked up by a malevolent government.

In “The Wine-Dark Sea,” a man named Taylor exclaims rabidly, apropos 9/11: “That was faked, wasn’t it? The planes into buildings . . . “I knew it! . . . No planes whatsoever!” If Taylor read at all, his taste would run toward conspiratorial mish-mash—say Dan Brown, but more murderous.

Robert Stone: his lifelong concerns include Vietnam, drugs, and varying shades of masculine disappointment.

My favorite story in Fun With Problems is the concluding tale already mentioned, “The Archer.” Stone’s prose is unbridled here as it records what appears to be Duffy’s irresistible rush toward implosion. Years after attacking his wife, Duffy is piecing himself together but coming apart anyway, maybe faster. Arriving at Pahoochee State University on the Gulf Coast to give a lecture, he’s sickened by what he perceives as the local blend of sanctimony and ugliness:

Insolent posters were affixed to [the] suffering trunks [of trees] with cruel nails the size of industrial staples, threatening passersby with the judgment of Christ. Artificial palms stood at intervals among the others like Judas goats at a slaughterhouse to encourage and betray the doomed natural ones.

Duffy’s Pahoochee hotel room provides no relief, with water from the faucet tasting “of baitfish and the Confederate dead.” Duffy’s academic host—a Professor Rind, yet—calls to say he’d like to bring his kids up to the room since they’d enjoy the ocean view and the elevator ride. By then, though, Duffy has drunk himself past the line separating “inebriation and riot”. He says: “Maybe they’d like it if I threw them out the fucking window. How many are there?” That appalling addendum—“How many are there?”—strikes me, at least, as priceless.

Duffy, in the dining room, blows up and declares that the crab being served is nothing but “some rotten thing out of a tube. Made by people who hate us and think we’re stupid.” This outburst brings the chef roaring out of the kitchen and mortifies Rind, his family, and a hapless, young waitress. Duffy never gets to deliver his talk on “contemporary American painting, more or less, and how it got that way.” Instead he does something that neither he nor the reader would have thought possible for him, and that might be called redemptive were Stone a more explicitly religious writer.

That Stone makes this unexpected act fully credible and rewarding is one reason Fun With Problems is such a good read.

A review of Prime Green and an interview I conducted with the author for The Boston Globe can be found here.

Chinese writer Liao Yiwu

On his way to the Cologne literature festival earlier this week, dissident Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was escorted off the plane by the Chinese authorities and handed over to the police for interrogation. He has sent an open letter to the world, available in English, asking for help.

I became acquainted with the writings of Liao Yiwu with the publication of the English translation of The Corpse Walker in 2008, an expansive volume of oral history, banned by the Chinese authorities in 2002, that offers a view of five decades of China’s history from the colorful perspective of the marginal and forgotten, the derided and the outmoded. Yiwu’s collection of 60 interviews was trimmed down to 27 in Wen Huang’s translation. I spoke to Wen about the translation and Liao Yiuw.

I followed up in 2008 when Liao Yiuw provided me a section of a diary he was writing about living through the earthquake in Sichuan province.

Liao Yiwu provided me an update on the aftermath of the earthquake a year later and then, on the 20th anniversary of the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen student movement, he provided me excerpts from “Massacre,” an epic poem about the violence that landed the writer in jail.

He is a fine writer and a brave man.

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Abdo Khal—winner of the Arab Booker

By Bill Marx

Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal won the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arab Booker) for his novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which is also known as She Throws Sparks.

Taleb Alrefai, who served as chair for this year’s panel of judges, said, “The winning novel is a brilliant exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state. Through the eyes of its two dimensional protagonist, the book gives the reader a taste of the horrifying reality of the excessive world of the palace.”

In 2008, I spoke with journalist and novelist Jonathan Levi, who co-founded the literary magazine Granta, serving as its U.S. editor until 1987. The writer has just visited Saudi Arabia, and he spoke to dissident novelist and journalist Adbo Khal and other authors about the state of Saudi writing. Levi talks to me about Khal’s challenges and what else he learned about literary life in the country. Along with a podcast of the conversation, there’s an excerpt from a Levi essay on the trip that deals with his encounter with Abdo Khal.

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Below is an excerpt from an essay Jonathan Levi wrote after his visit to Saudi Arabia. In this section, he recalls his meeting with Abdo Khal.

At four o’clock on my last full day in Saudi Arabia, Ebtihal Mubarak [a reporter for the Arab News] and I finally sit down in the coffee shop of the Jeddah Hilton with Abdo Khal. I’ve only read Ebtihal’s quick translation of the first chapter of his novel Immorality. But looking across at him, with his high, mahogany cheekbones and Yemeni brush mustache standing out against his white thobe and ghutra, he looks a little bit like a thug who’s gone respectable. Abdo is the first writer Ebtihal has brought me who isn’t solidly middle-class.

“I was born in the south,” he tells me through Ebtihal’s translation, “a very poor farming family. “My father died. We moved to Jeddah and all I wanted to do was read romantic stories so I could get on with the girls in the neighborhood. My mother thought I was going bad, so she sent me to Riyadh. Riyadh was like Siberia—if you wanted to punish someone, you sent them to Riyadh.” Luckily, Abdo was rooming in the house of a man with a big library—Dickens, Hugo in Arabic, Mahfouz, and Darwish. Somehow, in 1976, at the age of fourteen, Abdo found Allah and became an imam. He really was a southern boy, I thought, images of child preachers out of Sinclair Lewis and Eudora Welty turning the Hijazi Mountains into the Ozarks.

“I was out in the streets preaching, ‘you’ve got to believe in jihad or you’re going to hell.’ I really believed it. I even went home and tore up all the pictures and smashed the TV.” But Abdo’s spiritual leader was someone slightly more frightening than Elmer Gantry or Jerry Falwell. Juhaiman Al Otaibi was a militant fundamentalist who, at the end of 1979, in the company of 200 followers, attacked the Grand Mosque in Mecca and took hundreds of hostages, protesting the corruption of the royal family. It took two weeks for the government to retake the holy places. 250 people died, 600 were wounded. 68 terrorists were beheaded in the aftermath. Juhaiman was one. Abdo could have been another.

“Except in 1977,” Abdo says, “some friends from the south found me. They told me, ‘we’ve got something to show you.’”

Our club sandwiches and Pepsi’s arrive. Abdo takes a mouthful of fries and waits for the waiter to move off.

“It was in Old Jeddah, an old house that had been turned into a cinema. We sat down. My friends were giggling. Then the movie came on. It was called ‘The Cow,’ and it was pure porn!”

I eat half my sandwich waiting for Ebtihal to stop laughing, uncover her face and translate.

“The next day, they took me to the U.S. Consulate and we climbed a tree outside the wall. Inside was the swimming pool and a bunch of ladies in bikinis.” One boy fell off the tree into the Consulate garden and broke his leg. All the American women gathered around him. “He got to see the Cow for free,” Abdo laughs and takes a sip of his Pepsi. “So I stopped preaching and started writing.”

“Society is suffocating,” Abdo says, as we talk about Immorality and Saudi Arabia. “People aren’t human. They walk in fear, not from the government but from everyone around them who is telling them how to live.” Life means being afraid of everyone. There is more life inside the grave than out. All tender human feelings are buried. Ebtihal nods even as she translates for me. “We all become victims,” Abdo says. “And victims are deformed, amoral characters.”

I say goodbye to Abdo. I think, maybe this guy from the south, this sometime fundamentalist, this potential pornographer, while he may lack the epic sweep of Tolstoy, has the makings of a Saudi Simenon, or at least a Jeddah James Ellroy. I promise to try to get him to the States or England to meet western writers. He says something in Arabic to Ebtihal and laughs.

“What was that?” I ask as we walk out of the lobby into the light.

“Next time,” my Bedouin Virgil says, tucking her hair securely into her hijab, “he promises to take us to see ‘The Cow.’”

Mud, Sweat, and Gears: A Rowdy Family Bike Adventure Across Canada on Seven Wheels by Joe Kurmaskie, Breakaway Books, 304 pages, $23.95

Reviewed By Tom Samph

The Kurmaskies (Joe, his wife Beth, and three sons, Quinn, Enzo, and Matteo) left home in Portland, Oregon at the beginning of the summer with their panniers packed to the brim, headed East for Nova Scotia.

The men of the family are all aboard one bike. Joe takes the helm of a tandem bike with his eldest son, Quinn, behind. Next in line are Matteo and Enzo, who ride a trail-a-bike and trailer, respectively, attached to the back of the tandem. The bike is 16 feet long and 500 pounds—a monster of a bike that made it all the way across North America. In an equally impressive feat, Joe’s wife Beth makes the entire trip solo alongside the boys.

The setup makes for witty banter, tense arguments at times, and in the end, a stronger bond between the family members. Along the way, Joe tells of frequent, ravenous eating escapades after long days of pushing pedals, like Joe and Beth devouring the Trucker’s Dream—a three-tiered mountain of meat, gravy, potatoes, and veggies with a hamburger plopped in the middle—at a roadside diner. Stopping only to re-order macaroni and cheese for the kids, they finish the massive meal and the waitress presents them with mud flaps as their prize.

They meet quirky and sentimental characters on and off the bike like “Canada’s Robin Hood of rocking chairs,” an old man who rescues old rockers, repairs them, and donates them to libraries, schools, and anyone in need. And a singing, semi-nude, Irish cyclist they meet on the road who entices them to play a game of “I believe” while pedaling full speed.

Through their encounters with elk, bear, and rowdy Canadian hicks, the family bonds around their incredible feat of traversing a continent by bike. The book is a portrait of an energetic, adventurous family who uncover a new love for life and for each other over a 3,000-mile bike trip. Disconnected, no phones, it’s just the family, the road, and the people they meet along the way.

The mud and sweat collected on the road draw the family closer. The gears keep turning, and the intrepid family cruises across Canada. The trip itself shows the family’s spirit, and Joe shows his endless enthusiasm and passion for living, his family, and cycling, through his writing.

Joe lives and writes with incredible energy. The loves of his life—family, cycling, and writing—were present at every turn, and his retelling of the 3,000-mile family bike ride mirrors his vitality in life.

At times the story is laugh-out-loud funny. But while the humor is punchy and matter-of-fact, Joe also reflects on his past, weaving memories of his mother and the story of how he met his wife Beth with chapters of cycling, making the book both attentive and amusing.

Beth voices her opinion on Joe’s retelling of the adventure in brief footnotes at the bottom of each page as well. At first, the footnotes are a bit jolting, but once the reader is accustomed to the footnotes, they are a clever dialogue between the husband, wife, and reader. Plus, Joe didn’t take the trip by himself. The footnotes are just another part of the family’s honesty and passion. We were made to take risks and adventures, and the Kurmaskie family shows us it is possible.

Joe is an experienced cyclist, having ridden across the United States multiple times, taken tours across Africa, and braved the Australian outback. Beth, however, hadn’t ridden a bicycle since her teenage years, after she suffered a gruesome accident. Even with Joe’s formidable cycling experience, his family came to the rescue countless times throughout the book. Sometimes they disagree, sometimes there is tension, but through the mud and sweat, the relationship gears keep turning and the family is as close as ever.

The family is typical in many ways. Sons who think something is easy despite their father’s struggles to understand (“Can’t you just reboot your brain, Dad?” – Quinn). Sometimes skeptical, always protective, and loving mothers who keep their husbands from over exaggerating (“That’s a load o’ crap. I saw him power across the highway like he owned the roads.” – Beth). And gung-ho fathers who eventually give in to a lesson learned.

Reading the book is like sitting down with the Kurmaskies for a conversation over dinner after just having returned from their trip across Canada. They tell the story as a team, with bits of input here and there from each. Their story is enviable. As Joe tells it, even from the beginning of his relationship with Beth there was a sense of humor in both of them. Joe has an infectious energy and humor that is apparent in his writing.

While Mud, Sweat, and Gears tells the epic story of a family’s journey by bike across Canada, it really is a thoughtful collection of lessons and anecdotes about the Kurmaskies. This is not your ordinary (if anyone could ever call it ordinary) jaunt across Canada by bike with a description of the sights along the way. It’s the Mud, Sweat, and Gears of a relationship and a family told through a bike trip across Canada.

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Brecht At Night by Mati Unt, translated from the Estonian by Eric Dickens, Dalkey Archive Press (Baltic Literature Series), 209 pages, $13.95

Reviewed By Bill Marx

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
There will also be singing
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, Svendborg Poems

But can an artist who has absorbed some of “the dark times” sing of them? Questions of political opportunism, as well as the twisted prerogatives of creative egotism, drive Estonian writer Mati Unt’s postmodern, historical novel Brecht at Night. Unt isn’t concerned about how playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht sang about the rise of Hitler and Stalin or the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Instead, Unt examines, via an arch vaudevillesque irony, the narcissistic machinations of Brecht in the year 1940 when, fleeing Nazi Germany, he and his entourage of wife, mistresses, and children end up in Finland, the guests of playwright Hella Wuolijoki, a rich Communist sympathizer with Estonian roots. It is the portrait of the artist as a determinedly abstracted man, aside from his paranoid fear that Hitler has sent out assassins to kill him.

Unt’s Brecht is primarily concerned with making it to America, not attempting to make sense of the gathering forces of the night, which would touch on his uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union, Stalin, and Communism. The general impression left by the book is that it isn’t fear of censorship so much as a pervasive, inner decay that holds Brecht back from dealing with reality: “The worse thing for a writer is not, Brecht thinks, having to keep your mouth shut. It’s a lot worse when you have nothing to say via that mouth.”

Sadistically, Unt, a narrative kibitzer in the book, surrounds Brecht with realities that should have given the writer plenty to talk about. He provides excerpts from non-fiction accounts (newspaper articles, academic studies) of the horrendous happening in Europe, with a grim emphasis on the Soviet Union’s thuggish highjacking of Estonia. He also provides potted biographies of Brecht’s friends and lovers, showing how they were used and abused by Brecht and by history, camp followers betrayed or left on their own to survive.

All of this could have been heavy-handed—Brecht the selfish artist slapped around, over and over, in a circumscribed barrel. At his best, however, Unt brings sardonic humor to the dark proceedings, perhaps tapping on his own feelings about being an artist (playwright, novelist, director) bottled up by the Soviet Union. Unt’s Brecht chooses to see the world through Marxian rules, Hegelian hocus-pocus: “The covert theme of the book is, of course, dialectics, Brecht’s greatest love.” That streamlined notion of Brecht’s vision isn’t entirely fair, at least to his poetry, which at the time made use of ambiguity and skepticism, a satire made of mockery.

Still, the character’s intellectual triangulation amusingly seems to free him from looking too deeply at the demands of the here-and-now, aside from the sexual and secretarial demands he makes on the women in his life. (Unt draws on John Fuegi’s biography The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, which details the author’s swinish treatment of women.) Occasionally the author tries to wake Brecht up via an impish surrealism, such as having a very un-dialectical frog pop up in his room to give him a scare.

Unt includes a memorably funny chapter about a real-life Estonian government official who served as a stooge for the Soviets named M Unt (no relation to the author). The guy counts down his acts of repression before his bosses murder him: “Lithuania has been accepted as part of the Soviet Union (3rd August). There’s still time to go before my death.”

Still, it is difficult to keep the inventive black humor coming, and by mid-point Brecht at Night increasingly shoves the title artist aside to chronicle the lethal facts of Soviet domination. The book’s imagination gives way to presentation; it suggests that Unt lost interest in drawing (and re-drawing) ironic attention to Brecht’s disinterest in reality, his obsession with bourgeois comfort during a time of chaos. If Unt had included more of the undialectical consciousness that informs the (anti)lyrics in Svendborg Poems, the book’s exploration of the amoral writer-in-exile would have been richer and more compelling. Unt has a considerable reputation as a stage artist—but there is surprisingly little dramatic conflict in the book. His Brecht devolves into a didactic puppet.

Unt’s other novels available in English, Things in the Night and Diary of a Blood Donor, tap on rich veins of fantasy (apocalyptic meltdown, vampirism) to evoke the brutal truths about the somnambulism of life under (or after) the domination of the Soviet Union. In Brecht at Night the author speaks openly and powerfully about the crimes of authoritarian barbarity, the degradation of creativity and morality, and the slippery slope of self-involvement. But one misses his customary wildness, his imaginative gusto, as he goes about it.

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The Ninth by Ferenc Barnás, translated from the Hungarian by Paul Olchváry, Northwestern University Press (Writings from an Unbound Europe), 159 pages, $16.95

Reviewed By Bill Marx

A brilliantly unconventional look at life in a small village outside of Budapest in the late 1960s, Ferenc Barnás’s marvelous novel The Ninth comes off as an inventively dour, sardonically humorous version of Huckleberry Finn, except that the book’s nine-year-old narrator can’t light out for the territories once he begins to understand the duplicities of home, society, and morality. His indigence is too overwhelming, his family situation too absurd (he has nine siblings), and the soft authoritarianism of the government too robustly restrictive.

What’s more, Barnás gives his observant child hero an additional handicap—a disability that makes it difficult for him to speak and to read. Thus, the book’s central metaphor works itself out with grim logic: in surroundings this resolutely repressive, everything of value—creativity, morality, truth, and humanity—is bottled up inside, pressurized. What sort of steam could escape the Communist stopper? The answer suggests why Barnás’s third novel, which he admits is autobiographical, takes the form it does—a child’s frank, fanciful, and anarchistic view of moral survival amid repression.

Yet Barnás doesn’t revel in the gloom, an admirable artistry of refusal that turns away from predictable opportunities for extremism to nurture an indirection and subtlety that only deepens the factual surrealism of the situation and the time. The ninth child lives in a poverty-stricken, secretive, Catholic family that scrapes along by selling rosaries and religious gewgaws condemned by the Communist government. The boy’s domestic and school life is marked by starvation, overcrowding (the ten children sleep in three beds), overwork, and abuse. His father is tyrannical and short-tempered; his mother is kind but passive. In the course of the book, the family’s exhausting focus, under the father’s stern command, is to earn enough money to move into a larger house.

Barnás conveys the environment’s barbarism through ironic humor (“One afternoon, when for some reason I wasn’t in the mood to mutilate frogs out in the yard with the others . . .”) and memories of violence that are kept offstage (“the other day our father gave us twenty lashes on our soles for being late, he used the iron’s chord but it was better than watching klaro get it . . .”). Catholicism serves as a rich satiric source of meager solace, wry hypocrisy, and amusingly secular observations, such as the peculiar but understandable satisfactions the inarticulate kid finds in serving as an altar boy: “It’s so good to see people shut their eyes while sticking their tongues above the tray! Nowhere else could I see so many different sorts of tongues; lots of them are quivering, and some are colored stranger than I ever would have thought.”

Ferenc Barnás

It is this agile emphasis on homey detail rather than trauma and despair that has led the book’s too few reviewers to dwell on Barnás’s admirable modesty and nuance. For me, The Ninth is all the more provocative because it depicts, through a nimble exploration of a child’s stream-of-consciousness, the vicissitudes of his imagination and the tee-tottering state of his soul amid the village’s sickening perfidy, corruption, and stupidity. When the kid steals money from his teacher and spends his ill-gotten gains on cakes and candies for his classmates, the idea is not to stage a pint-sized crime and punishment.

Barnás wants us to watch his narrator shape the parameters of the self he will become, dramatizing whether the child will absorb the guilt and spiritual poverty around him or become an individual by embracing the possibility of change, by speaking the self-incriminating truth. Memorably, his confession seems to burst out of him, against his will: “Everything becomes even hotter inside me as something begins surging up into my chest, something sure to gush into my mouth in no time: the saliva is already sour in my throat, as at other times. ‘It was me,’ I say.” What looks like a modest tale of growing up becomes a far more ambitious examination of the formation of an ethical consciousness, almost out of thin air, in an authoritarian state built on lies and coercion.

Barnás’s nine-year-old narrator is a brave construct, an unconsciously sophisticated consciousness that filters life’s hardships and decisions through a startling innocence, an amoral earnestness. The character’s emotional life is weirdly attenuated, his thoughts often taking on a gnomic vagueness redolent of post-modern philosophy: “It must count a lot, what we assume on account of what, and what we imagine we hear in what; at least that’s what the last month taught me.” Translator Paul Olchváry skillfully captures the novel’s fascinating blend of arch artificiality, sharp-eyed realism, and antic fantasy, all at the service of depicting the inner life of the marginal among us.

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Leslie McIntosh, featured performer at The Cantab Lounge’s Weekly Poetry Slam

The Cantab, as the regulars called The Cantab Lounge, is like a quirky not-quite-speakeasy complete with a narrow stairwell leading below street level and smoke-perfumed attendees. This night, bass chords shake the ceiling, courtesy of the band headlining one floor up. Dim lights hardly illuminate the cramped room, which is lined with folding chairs. The room is packed, full of twenty-somethings who are all waiting for this poetry slam’s feature act: Leslie McIntosh.

Since they first began in a lone Chicago jazz club in the ‘80s, poetry slams have been a form of live theater, the versifiers infusing their art with feeling and attitude, performing for an audience that then judges their “act.” As the decades passed, slam poetry spread around the country, popping up in towns like Denver, Boston, and Philly, where youth and college teams now practice and compete at local in preparation for national competitions like the National Poetry Slam (NPS) and the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI).

It was at CUPSI 2006 that Simone Beaubien, the SlamMaster at the Cantab Lounge and some other Boston versifiers were blown away by poet Leslie McIntosh’s performance. Three years later on Dec. 30, 2009, these poets convinced McIntosh to travel from New York and take the stage at The Cantab Lounge’s weekly poetry slam in Boston.

Even after the audience greets him with a huge cheer, McIntosh still looks uncomfortable in front of such a large group and says as much. His voice wavers as he introduces himself, and his hands visibly shake as holds his first poem at arm’s length.

This nervousness is nothing new. Naturally quiet and soft-spoken, McIntosh says for years he felt too scared and unprepared to be one of the individuals onstage and opted to sit in the audience. Nevertheless, he was inspired, especially by the poets at the NPS: “It was life altering to see these people take their words and give them a life that exists so separately from the page.”

Since mustering up the confidence to join a team of poets and formally introducing himself to the slam world at CUPSI 2006, McIntosh says verse has stayed with him. “I’ve been living my life in/through poetry in one way or another ever since.”

At The Cantab, McIntosh shows this passion on stage. The audience breathes a sigh of happiness at his first line. “When we first met,” he says softly, “I told you my pelvis was the road map to Atlantis.” A few more lines and some small stumbles in, McIntosh hits his stride. The nervous facade drops away, and a passionate, strong performer appears.

Later, he tells me how he doesn’t choreograph his poems like some poets. Instead, he connects with the emotion he felt when first writing it. “There’s always a feeling at the root. I try to tap that and fall into it completely . . . I never really know exactly what’s gonna happen each time I do the poem.” This emotion McIntosh recalls is felt deeply by the audience as he performs at The Cantab.

It is clear that McIntosh can genuinely woo an audience. His voice rises and falls in intensity; his anger becomes the audience’s anger. His quiet words, in turn, calm the crowd. Nevertheless, he has what he calls a “performative clunkiness,” which is seen as he drifts between reading from printed pages, notebooks and lined sheets before pulling out an iPhone for his last two poems.

This iPhone is a seemingly anachronistic reminder that slam poetry has stepped firmly into the 21st century since its humble beginnings. In recent years, though, the art of the “spoken word” has expanded beyond physical audiences and into the virtual reality of online social networks.

Beaubien, who as SlamMaster has helped to run and manage The Cantab’s poetry events since 2004, tells me that the poets she knows are just like everyone else in their use of social networks. They “use MySpace for gig schedules, LiveJournal for feedback and tour blogs, and FaceBook for day-to-day communication, including quick crits on the text of new poems.” In addition, she says poets pass around YouTube clips to criticize or use as inspiration.

There is also poetryslam.com. Launched in 2007 by the non-profit organization Poetry Slam, Inc., this site is an attempt to provide a one-stop shop for all things slam poetry. In addition to highlighting slam news and events listings, poetryslam.com also has a forum where people can converse on subjects ranging from how to start a regular slam in their home city to the pros and cons of slam poetry use in national advertising campaigns.

Poets use networks to stay connected, Beaubien says, but many first meet face-to-face at the national competitions where poets famous in the slam world and new poets like McIntosh perform.

At The Cantab, McIntosh runs through a gauntlet of topics in his nine-poem set, from racism and break-ins to identity, love, first impressions, couples who practice PDA on the subway, retail jobs, Daria, jealousy, love, waterboarding, and the frustrating value of hindsight.

Dramatic lines yield gasps and snaps from the audience (”I would be gracious enough to visit it upon your mother. I would say them to her the most filthy of sins was being pro-life”), clever metaphors draw laughs and claps, and others leave the audience breathless (”Make them take a number, Make sure they don’t know how to count”).

Other highlights include:

The experience of a break-in: The shot gun watches on with explosive interest.
They promised they would not make love to me tonight.

Retail jobs: Had I known that on that day, I would be taunted by angels, greeted by demons, tempted by murder and suicide, I probably would have called out of work sick . . .

An ode to MTV’s Daria: Let’s build an unremarkable home in the suburbs where we can go to be maladjusted together . . .

Love and losing ourselves: I never told anybody that my body wasn’t always my body. Who would believe me? That a vessel this vast could be a ghost ship?

Almost everything McIntosh performs at The Cantab Lounge is autobiographical, but it wasn’t always this way. McIntosh says when he first began writing poems he would write about others who had similar stories and lives.

“This was an enormous help for me at the time. Sometimes, the world is so big, beautiful, and horrifying you need to talk about it from the safe distance that another person’s life gives you.” Today McIntosh asks himself questions by “taking apart and re-assembling the building blocks of who and what I am.” McIntosh understands that he’s asking some unwieldy questions, but says that whether or not he finds simple answers, “there’s an indelible, invaluable amount of discovery that comes from just the ‘asking.’”

It’s this kind of simple honesty and openness that gains McIntosh a respect beyond his ability to weave eloquent verse. People at The Cantab Lounge enthusiastically lined up to speak with him at the end of the reading. McIntosh graciously took time with each aspiring poet, each person who was touched or inspired by his words.

When I ask what’s in his future, McIntosh discusses the Masters of Fine Arts he is working on in New York City (which fittingly has him “writing poems, reading poems, critiquing other peoples’ poems, and generally writing about poetry”). His stint as a social worker also sparked his interest in promoting literacy and the arts for at-risk youths. “There are so many different ways to touch lives and help people besides just poetry. I believe that a lot of the true ‘life changing’ is done behind the scenes as well as from behind the mic.”

While he doesn’t rule out more performances in the future, McIntosh is focused on continuing to immerse himself in writing verse, meeting other poets, and helping others. “My poetry will continue to be my way to process and navigate the existence I find myself in,” McIntosh says. “I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, but it will definitely always be with me, and I’m always open to meet and share with people who feel that tug in their gut as well.”

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The Cantab Lounge (738 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge) hosts open mics, featured performers and poetry slams every Wednesday night for $3, unless otherwise noted on their website. Check for more information on dates and times here.

If you’re interested in witnessing poetry slam performances for yourself, McIntosh says one of the best places to start is at CUPSI 2010, which takes place at Emerson College April 7-10.

Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane. Akashic Books, $15.95

Reviewed by Kate Vander Wiede

In the introduction of Boston Noir, editor, contributor. and best-selling novelist Dennis Lehane explains that while Aristotle “mandated that a tragic hero must fall from a great height,” the noir genre generally finds tragedy among working-class men and women who fall from curbs, not mountainsides.

The latest addition to Akashic Books series of ‘noir’ anthologies faithfully follows Lehane’s demand; the best yarns here, though gloomy, touch on the worries we all experience throughout our lives – lack of fulfillment, loneliness, indecision, stagnancy. These gloomy tales bring our own dark fantasies to the forefront. If our livelihood or our happiness was at stake perhaps we too would raise a gun instead of walking away, turn to poison rather than give up something we love. Or perhaps not. We can dream noir dreams, can’t we?

For example, in “Exit Interview,” Lynne Heitman introduces Sloan, a woman executive who kills her boss after being passed up for a promotion. Heitman deftly creates a believable back story for this nine-to-fiver turned manic murderer, who blithely reasons that “she would always be a senior portfolio manager, which was why she’d had no choice but to take the .22 out of her bag and shoot Trevor through the head.”

Don Lee’s “The Oriental Hair Poets” finds an ex-policeman private-investigator missing a chance “to emerge from the deadness.” His inability to trust his love interest leaves the investigator back where he started—alone. Lee explores how easily apathy can become a routine, probing the difficulty of breaking a comfortable but self-destructive cycle.

In editor Dennis Lehane’s contribution, a guy named Bob faces losing the one thing that brings him happiness: his new puppy. Having lived an unsuccessful and lonely life, Bob explains the stuff that haunts him (“the shitty things you did to get ahead. Those things laughed at you if your ambitions failed to amount to much; a successful man could hide his past; an unsuccessful man sat in his.”) and ultimately decides to change his fate, pulling a fast one on the reader in the process. Lehane’s tale stands out as welcome relief to the anthology’s gloom and doom— it is one of the few with a happy ending.

The above tales, as well as Jim Fusilli’s and Dana Cameron’s contributions, are deftly and simply written. Sturdy plot lines draw the reader into the story where he or she will find their own failures and yearnings mirrored in the protagonists’ lives.

Be warned, however, that the more successful stories are in the beginning of the book. Once you reach mid-way the quality of the writing becomes more variable, the volume peppered with less compelling, clunkier instances of crime. Perhaps the pleasure lessens because the more stories you read the more you realize there’s a 75 percent chance someone is going to get axed. Hence, you spend your time trying to figure out who it is and when it will happen instead of enjoying characterization and plotting.

Even given that reasoning, some of the tales are less appealing because they don’t play fair with the reader — they leave unanswered questions and bewilderingly murky motivations.

It doesn’t make very much sense that Patricia Powell’s protagonist doesn’t report to the police that she has an escaped prisoner in her home. She worries about the dangerous stranger and at one point tries to call the cops before she realizes the phone line is cut. But when she finally gets the chance to tattle, she doesn’t, and Powell doesn’t provide a good enough reason why.

The shifting timeline and locations in Itabari Njeri’s “The Collar” causes unnecessary confusion. Too many side stories overwhelm the main plotline, and I was left wondering what I was supposed to take away from the tale.

Stewart O’Nan’s contribution is about a young woman who cares for her older father through an arrangement of deceptive machinations. While intriguing in concept, the story doesn’t bother to provide much understanding of the main character’s motivations or feelings—there was too much action and reaction, not enough psychological depth.

John Dufresne’s “The Cross-Eyed Bear” weaves a hauntingly sad tale of a priest who has been accused of molestation. The premise of this story caught my attention; some of the reasoning behind the figure’s priestly sin was jarring and rang true. (“You snap on the Roman collar, and you have instant respect without having earned it.”) But the story overemphasized ambiguity to the point that the reader is left wondering about essential issues of identity and resolution.

Despite the anthology’s unevenness, most of the tales provide pleasure in one way or another. Part of the excitement comes from the narrative twist and turns, coupled with surprising and enticing conclusions. (Like when we find out Lehane’s lonely poor old Bob is much more than just a devout puppy lover.)

Moreover, despite committing such despicable acts as stealing babies and robbing cash-only restaurants, most of the protagonists earn the reader’s empathy. They are living out our dark fantasies for us—taking on the mantle of action at all costs; fighting for their pain-ridden lives to be better instead of standing aside. Some of the characters could be said to win the fight, while other fail horribly. But it doesn’t matter to us—we’re busy sitting back and relishing our darkest thoughts being acted out by others.

Despite its ups and downs, Boston Noir digs memorably into the reader’s darkest thoughts while taking a stroll through Boston’s gritty time and space. Just keep in mind that the bucketfuls of messy, dastardly life the anthology drudges up will give you 11 more reasons to look over your shoulder as you walk the streets at night.

Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison, Knopf, 208 pp., $25

by Helen Epstein

In 1995, a psychology professor named Kay Redfield Jamison took the unusual step of publishing an article in her local paper, the “Washington Post,” about her battle with manic depression; later that year, her extraordinary and extraordinarily-well-written memoir An Unquiet Mind, became a best-seller.

Before 1995, Jamison was known primarily as a researcher, the co-author with Frederick K. Goodwin, MD of the textbook Manic-Depressive Illness, published in 1990 and author of a second text on creativity and manic depression titled Touched with Fire. Unlike most authors of memoir, Jamison was putting her professional life at risk by publishing her book. As a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology, her decision to go public as a woman suffering from “manic-depression” (she has said that the term “bipolar” minimizes and distorts the illness) was antithetical to many of her colleagues. How could she continue to work as a clinician if patients knew she took lithium? How could she effectively teach students if they knew about the tumult of her mental life?

Jamison returns to this cost-benefit analysis in her new book Nothing Was the Same, but this time through the prism of her marriage to Richard Wyatt, the scientist and specialist in schizophrenia with whom she lived for nearly 20 years.

“It is in our nature to want to hold on to love,” she writes simply. Like Lynn Caine (Widow) Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), Anne Roiphe (Epilogue), and Madeleine L’Engle (Two-Part Invention), who have written memoirs of their marriages after a beloved spouse has died, Redfield is only partially successful in transforming a ritual of mourning into literary art. While Jamison often writes with the lyricism and precision of a poet, Nothing Was the Same is nowhere near as affecting nor as revelatory as An Unquiet Mind, a classic of memoir that I have bought for dozens of friends and recommended to many students. That book is a meditation that succeeded in conveying both the rawness of lived experience and the wisdom of long reflection.

Though the writing in Nothing Was the Same is often beautiful and moving, it failed to fully engage me. Memorializing one’s marriage is a dicey assignment. How many times can one write, as Jamison does, “We had fun” or “I want him back,” before the reader puts the book down.

Jamison is such an intelligent and honest writer, and one whose voice I enjoy so much that I read until the end. There are many wonderfully dry passages such as this one describing herself, before An Unquiet Mind, as an unlikely memoirist who “like most people, had been brought up to be private about personal matters….Being an Episcopalian didn’t help. The Frozen Chosen had thawed over the years but still veered toward immoderate discretion…I did not confess, concede or admit. It wasn’t done.”

While Jamson was able to transcend her reticence about personal matters in her memoir of mental illness, she does not in Nothing Was the Same. In a foreword that promises far more than she is able to deliver, Jamison writes: “He was my husband, colleague, and friend: when he became ill and we knew he would die, he became my mentor in how to die with the grace by which he had lived. What he could not teach me — no one could — was how to contend with the grief of losing him.” We never get a real picture of what Dr. Wyatt was like as a man, a doctor or a husband, nor how she and he first got together and developed as a couple. Although the memoir is billed as a meditation on mortality, grief and loss, I finished it wondering what I had learned. Perhaps this memoir was written too soon and needed another couple of years to steep.

I look forward to reading Jamison’s next book.
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Helen Epstein is the author of the memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

“Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance” by Michael Goldfarb, Simon and Schuster, 408 pages, $30.00.

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

Michael Goldfarb is an American-born, London-based contributor to NPR (as well as to THE BBC and “The Guardian”), who was inspired to endure “the agony of writing” his engaging book for seemingly disjointed reasons. One was Talmudic. “The Talmud,” he tells us, enjoins Jews to perform 613 mitzvoth or commandments. Goldfarb, though far from an observant Jew, nevertheless adduced and felt called upon to fulfill yet a 614th mitzvah, one that enjoined him, along with other “Jews born after the Holocaust . . . to reclaim and retell one part of the history of our people.”

The slice of history Goldfarb sets out to reclaim is that of Jews who entered into the mainstream of European society when, in the late eighteenth-century, the Enlightenment began to pry open legal, cultural and physical ghettos. At their first brush with the broader world, the outsider status of newly emancipated Jews permitted them to see both the failings in and the opportunities presented by the status quo more clearly than many of their contemporaries. They were equipped to be critics, artists, and businessmen — catalysts for change, in other words, which, in turn, often made them suspect in the eyes of the population at large and put them at risk.

Their emancipation was, in any case, tenuous and reversible. One hears Ghetto doors literally opening and closing throughout Goldfarb’s chronicle. One of his chief points is that over time Jews were able to claim and fight for rights in their own voices and on their own behalf, rather than solely by petitioning mercurial protectors.

The book begins in 1785, shortly before the French Revolution, when a question proposed for general discussion among the French literati was: “Is there a way to make a better wine press?” The wine press question was accompanied by a social question: “Are there means to render the Jews more useful and happy in France?”

Goldfarb takes the debate about whether Jews could — or should — be rendered more useful and happy through the French Revolution, where it inspired endless hours of debate in the National Assembly, and to the rise of Napoleon. Napoleon suppressed debate but decided in favor of general emancipation. When his forces conquered Italy, denizens of its ancestral ghettos were astounded to find that there were Jews in the liberating army, who relieved them of the Jewish stars they had been compelled to wear since the Middle Ages.

Goldfarb comes to his story from a very different angle. As a journalist who, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, found himself reporting on radical Islam, he wondered about parallels between nineteenth-century Jewish and twenty-first century Muslim experience of Europe. Jews, like Muslims today, were once by and large considered inassimilable. Moreover, there was a religious element among them who vociferously opposed contagion by exposure to European culture.

Goldfarb notes that “In 1811, as Napoleon marched east through the Ashkenazi heartland into Russia, Rabbi Shneur Zalman, founder of Lubavitcher Hasidism, found his sleep troubled.” Should he support Napoleon, who would make Jewish life easier, or lend his weight to the Tsar, historic oppressor of the Jews? Rabbi Zalman opted for the Tsar. “Even though poverty will increase,” he reasoned, “the hearts of Israel will be bound, fastened and tied to their Father in Heaven.” Goldfarb notes drily that: “Very few Jews in Russia helped the French.”

Goldfarb’s account uses Spinoza as a touchstone (documenting his influence on John Locke, for example), hones in on Moses Mendelssohn, praised as an exemplary Enlightenment philosopher by Immanuel Kant, and spends a fair amount of time on Karl Marx and his peers, many of whom were contending, whether as converts or not, with their weight of Jewish heritage. Goldfarb’s reprise of Marx is notable for making less of the gentile Fredrich Engels and more of Jews like Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine. It was Hess, for example, who, in 1847, first coined the expression, “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism,” with which Marx, a year later, began the Communist Manifesto.

Goldfarb seamlessly weaves elements of his family’s story into the narrative. He tells the tale of Mordechai Katz, for example, his great-grandfather, who left Odessa in 1884, became Goldenfarb, a more Germanic name, when in Hamburg, and had the name shortened and finalized as Goldfarb by an immigration clerk when in the United States.

“Emancipation,” though an honorable effort to fulfill the author’s 614th commandment, is not and does not claim to be, definitive. There are grounds for questioning some of Goldfarb’s omissions and conclusions, as I had an opportunity to do during an email exchange with the author.

HB: You write: “A young Orthodox Jewish woman from Galicia arrives in New York, drops out of school at fourteen, and goes to work in a sweatshop. Her son becomes a doctor. His son becomes a writer. Along the way, religious observance diminished in importance, the identity of Jew does not. That happens to be my family’s story, but in its broad outlines it is like millions of others.”
But what space is left for secular Jews at this point? Hasn’t secular Jewish culture shrunk?

Author and journalist MIchael Goldfarb

I am an atheist, I am also a Jew. How could I not be? No one can take away that part of my identity formed at seders at my grandmother’s house, the overheard conversations (in the 1950’s) about Israel and the Holocaust, and the whispers about whether this person or that person was Jewish. Nor can anyone take from me the questioning wit that is the hallmark of Jewish thinking.

HB: You write, re Moses Mendelssohn, that: “The very idea that a Jew . . . could write with such eloquence was considered astonishing in and of itself.” Was it really the case prior to the Enlightenment that Jews were considered unfit for literature? How radically at odds with current typology!

MG: Jews were considered “clever.” But before Spinoza they didn’t engage with the great intellectual questions of the day. Spinoza wrote in Latin. But Mendelssohn wrote in German — his third language — and no Jew had ever published such important work in that language up to that point in time. That’s what made it seem astonishing.

HB: Bernard Lazare is remembered for his fierce condemnation of French Jewry’s timidity and passivity during the Dreyfus Affair. Where would someone like Lazare be in the Jewish world today?

MG: Probably living in Israel. Writing for “Ha’aretz.” Feuding with everybody.

HB: The poet Heinrich Heine complains: “I try to tell my grief and it all becomes comic.” You comment: “No one has ever distilled the essence of modern Jewish writing so clearly”. But what’s so funny about Jewish grief?

MG: What underlies mordant Jewish wit is profound anger and confusion: think of Philip Roth (who, by the way, regards Heine very highly). The irony of the interrogative in shaping Jewish jokes derives from Talmud study but its withering sarcasm is motivated by grief. “Thank you for making us the Chosen People, but couldn’t you have chosen someone else.”

HB: Though you deal with Marx at some length, you barely touch on his alleged anti- Semitism. Do you feel it has been overblown?

MG: No, there’s no getting around the self-hatred inside of Marx. But then he was full of hatred about every aspect of his origins. He hated the bourgeois class from which he came just as much. His views were always overstated. One of the reasons his work found an audience was his skill with invective. Over-reaching is the hallmark of all his writing, as anyone who has struggled through “Das Kapital” can attest.

HB: You make a parallel between the Jewish experience of Europe in the nineteenth century and the Muslim experience of it today. How so?

MG: Picture the typical Ashkenazi Jew coming out of the ghetto: he wears traditional dress, takes a different Sabbath, is barely fluent in the local language. He goes to his rabbinical courts for redress on every legal question. He doesn’t trust his new environment but has to earn a living within the confines of it. The society is demanding that overnight he stop with the silly clothes and strange Sabbath and go to the same court as everyone else, and to hasten the process is passing legislation forbidding his traditional way of life. How do you think his children feel?

Now, picture a Muslim immigrant from a small village in Pakistan, Bangla Desh or Turkey. He wears traditional dress, takes a different Sabbath, is barely fluent in the local language. He trusts his Shari’a court more than the local justice system. In fact, he trusts very little about his new environment but this is where he has to make a living.

The society is demanding that overnight he stop with the silly clothes and strange Sabbath and go to the same court as every one else, and to hasten the process is passing legislation forbidding his traditional way of life. How do you think his children feel?

Those are the similarities. The critical difference is that Islam today is going through a civil war between those who want to be modern and the radicals who want to take the religious community back to their interpretation of the “pure” Islam. Some frustrated younger people are turning to the radicals.

HB: You ask: “What was the price paid by the Jewish community and European society for the process of integrating?” The second part of that question is disturbing. What price did Europe pay for having Jews?

MG: Hmm, you catch out a phrase that is rhetorically interesting but on reflection may be no more than that. Let me go rabbinical on you and answer a question with a question. “What has been the price paid by the African-American community and the wider American society for the process of integration?” The changes in the society brought about by admitting Jews into it as citizens were similar.

Not every individual in Europe in the nineteenth century had his or her life changed by this different Jewish presence. But the society was completely changed by it: through the work of Jewish intellectuals, financiers and simply by the fact that an old sense of Christian superiority had been challenged.

HB: You live in England, for the most part. I’ve never thought of England having much in the way of robust secular Jewish expression. Wouldn’t Manhattan suit you better?

MG: There are fewer Jews in Britain than you can find in Zabar’s in Manhattan on an average weekend morning. But the Jewish question was not what motivated my move here. I’m a descendant of Jews who left their homelands for a New Land in order to have a better life. I moved to London from New York for the same reason. I was a total failure in the town of my birth. Within five years of moving to London I was writing for “The Guardian,” making programs for the BBC and had become NPR’s London correspondent. So I’m living the immigrant dream in reverse.

HB: You describe Jews as having had their “mullahs,” so to speak, rabbis who detested the likes of Mendelssohn, for instance. Don’t we still have them, on the religious right in Israel for example.

MG: I think the power you refer to is very mutable and reflects the times in which we live. Fundamentalism is eating away at all the Abrahamic faiths at the moment. This era will pass, I hope.

For those interested interested in the work and lives of classical musicians, or if you teach feature writing, magazine writing, cultural reporting or non-fiction narrative, the profiles in “Music Talks” make a perfect holiday gift or useful addition to the classroom.

It is a volume of 4000 word-and-under profiles of celebrated artists by resident Culture Vulture Helen Epstein. The line-up includes such stars as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein, violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, James Galway, and Yo-Yo Ma. Many of these interviews appeared in the “Sunday New York Times” or other national publications.

Jonathan Baldo of the Eastman Music School has been using these pieces for 20 years and persuaded Helen to get the book back in print. Luckily the Authors Guild Back-in-Print program made that possible. David Hajdu at Columbia and Megan Marshall at Emerson are among the professors who find them helpful to students.

The new edition is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. Order through the link below to Amazon and theartsfuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

By Bill Marx

The time has come for a brilliant collection of stories, written in the 1920s, about the Soviet future.

Some of my favorite books from around the world this year raise the thorny issue of the relationship between literature new and the old. The critical and commercial reception of a translation in English often depends on the quality of the translation. Thus the reputation of many works of international literature has been hampered by ham-fisted or inexpert debuts into English, an issue compounded by the corruption of texts because of political or social censorship.

Ironically, when superior, unexcised translations appear later they make surprisingly little impact, as if art was simply a matter of timing. American publishing puts a discouraging spin on Ezra Pound’s much-quoted adage: here literature turns out to be yesterday’s news that stays yesterday.

For example, how should we evaluate Robert Chandler’s compelling rendition of an unbowdlerized edition of Andrei Platonov’s masterpiece about Soviet authoritarianism “The Foundation Pit”? Is this a new book? Or, after two earlier versions, is this volume mainly of interest to scholars?

Is this translation necessary?

The flip side of the translation question touches on the influence of economics. How many versions of Franz Kafka in English we need? Oxford University Press has just released new versions of “The Castle” (translated by Anthea Bell) and “The Metamorphosis and Other Stories” (translated by Joyce Crick). Both read well, but are they really necessary? Shrinking column inches for book reviews in newspapers and magazines means that there will be few (if any) meaningful critical comparisons among competing versions.

This preamble explains the presence of “old” new volumes on my holiday list.

Please keep in mind that these are rough times for publishers, especially small presses specializing in challenging books in translation, which is why I have done my best to choose volumes from presses located some distance from the mainstream.

At this point, placing books on your gift-giving list becomes an act of cultural investment, along with the considerable readerly playbacks of stuffing your stockings with international fiction and non-fiction. Each year the paradox grows increasingly absurd: cultural pressures mount on American publishing to shed its provincialism, yet the number of books translated into English remains relatively small.

Fiction:

1) Memories of the Future by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Translated by Joanne Turnbull. (NYRB Classics) A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem. Little of Krzhizhanovsky’s work was published during his lifetime because it was simply too bizarre (and politically incorrect) for the Russia of the 1920s. I think we are more than ready for him now – an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic.

2) Your Face Tomorrow Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (New Directions) The final installment in Marías’s super spy novel extraordinaire, a final playing out, to the point of demonic exhaustion, of the last century’s obsession with double agents, secret codes, voyeurism, and betrayal. An epic dramatization of backstabbing on all levels – from the psychological to the metaphysical – comes to a fascinating if complicated end.

3) The End of Everything by David Bergelson. Translated by Joseph Sherman. (Yale University Press) First published in 1913, Bergelson’s prophetic novel makes use of a surprisingly nervy minimalism to tell the tale of a beautiful woman from a privileged background whose life is shattered by a marriage of convenience – a searching diagnosis of the anxious hollowness at the center of Jewish life during the turn-of-the-century.

4) Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Translated by David Slavitt. (Harvard University Press) An at times intentionally zany new version of one of the literary high points of the Italian Renaissance, an epic crowded with jousting men and monsters that influenced Spencer’s “Faerie Queen,” that Shakespeare lifted a plot from, and that Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges admired. Slavitt’s spiffy translation entertainingly reinvigorates the melodramatic, satiric, battle-heavy antics of Ariosto’s prolix fantasy. Orlando’s impossible passion for the pagan princess Angelica is conveyed through playful iambic pentameter and rhyme:

A wonderful horse, but a horse is a horse and it’s not
a hippogryph. Still, in a joust or fight
his courage and strength could never be forgot.

I await Terry Gilliam’s movie version.

5) The Salt Smugglers by Gerard de Nerval. Translated by Richard Sieburth. (Archipelago Books) This volume is the rib-tickling oddity of the year: the first translation into English of an experimental novel that, back in 1850, appeared in a French newspaper masquerading as reportage. The powers-that-be had passed a law essentially banning serial novels; Nerval engagingly took up the challenge and concocted this deliciously subversive piece of “journalism,” a humdinger of humbug that scrambles fact and imagination amid a swashbuckling quest for an elusive book. Of course, Nerval deftly lampoons notions of authority, fiction, and censorship along the way.

6) The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov. Translated by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson. (Open Letter) A satire of political and economic corruption in 1920s Russia whose delicious blend of the daffy and the acidic resonates today. A larger-than-life con man, Ostrap Bender, leads a crew of scallywags on a surreal rampage of chicanery. This is the first complete version in English of a 1931 novel whose charmingly jaundiced view of avariciousness is worthy of David Mamet and Ben Jonson.

Non-Fiction:

1) Dostoevsky: A Writer in his Time by Joseph Frank. Edited by Mary Petrusewicz. (Princeton University Press) Not a translation but so what? Frank’s monumental five-volume study of Dostoevsky deserves to be read, if only as an inspiring lesson about how much more thrilling a focus on ideas can be than the standard biography’s obsession with the connections between creativity and the subject’s personal life. The series has been condensed with incisive care and respect, giving those with limited time (and budget) a chance to engage with a revelatory vision of the Russian writer’s enduring greatness.

2) Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen. Translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. (Yale University Press) This biography doesn’t have the intellectual heft of Frank’s but its tortured subject, Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, offers a life of Dostoevskian complexity, a manic mix of genius and moral blindness. A celebrated writer (his fans included Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ernest Hemingway) who won the1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of Norway. He never renounced his wartime actions, including a much-publicized visit with Adolf Hitler. “If there is one thing I have learned in this work,” writes Kolloen in the book’s Preface, “it is the following: each of us contains more fateful contradictions than we can ever fathom.”

3) Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings by Natsume Sōseki. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda, and Joseph A. Murphy. (Columbia University Press) The nerdiest pick on my list, but for fans of one of Japan’s greatest novelists (“Kokoro,” “Kusamakura”) this volume of his literary criticism offers insights into his fiction as well as some prescient ideas about realism and multiculturalism. Much of the volume is made up of excerpts from Sōseki’s science-minded “Theory of Literature” – some of which are dated and dense. I suggest reading the informative introduction and skipping around until you hit pay dirt. For example, this interesting passage on the value of individuality from Sōseki’s essay “Philosophical Foundations of the Literary Arts”:

It is only when one has an ideal that is new, profound, or broad, only when one tries to realize that ideal in the world but finds the world foolishly prevents this – only then does technique become truly useful to the person in question. When the world prevents us from developing our ideal in real life, then the only avenue remaining is to use technique to realize that ideal in the form of a literary work.

4) Woman from Shanghai by Xianhui Yang. Translated by Wen Huang. (Pantheon) An oddly titled but fascinating book whose fables of humanity shed gruesome light on the horror of the Chinese gulags. Author Xianhui Yang spent three years talking to survivors of a prison camp that had been set up in Jiabiangou (China’s northwestern desert region) during the late 1950’s. Over three thousand Chinese citizens, condemned as “rightists” by the Communist Party, were sent for “reeducation” in the compound, which still cannot be spoken about without fear in the author’s homeland. To escape censorship, the interviews were published as works of fiction in China, though they are based on fact.

5) On the Life and Death of Languages by Claude Hagège. Translated by Jody Gladding. (Yale University Press) A polemic by a noted French linguist alarmed at the accelerating death rate for languages around the world – he claims that at the current pace half of the world’s five thousand languages will fade away within the next century. The book proffers a passionate and often eloquent argument against efforts to establish English as a single world language: “To defend our languages and their diversity, especially against the domination of a single language, is to do more than just defend our cultures. It is to defend our life.”

6) Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya by Wojciech Jagielski. Translated by Soren A. Gauger. (Seven Stories Press) This riveting work of reportage by an award-winning Polish journalist supplies an overview – flinty, empathetic, and complex – of decades of warfare in Chechnya. In 2008 the volume’s memorable vision of violence as Sisyphean absurdity won the international Literatura Frontera Award in Italy.

Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers meet in the Gamm Theatre production

Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb

To celebrate the start of its 25th season, the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is offering two Shakespeare plays in repertory: “Romeo and Juliet” and “Much Ado About Nothing.” This is not an easy assignment to bring off, especially with essentially the same cast in both shows, but the Gamm is admirably up to the task. On weekends it is even possible to see both plays on the same day (as I did).

Sara Ossana has designed a versatile unit set – a central ogive and a pair of left and right steps leading up to a second level with more ogives. The basic color is a neutral gray, with rich red hangings for “Romeo” and tan ones for “Much Ado.” A few movable props are sufficient to accommodate the changes of location, abetted by Jen Rock’s varied lighting designs. Many scenes are linked by brief interludes played live on guitar, clarinet, violin and contrabass.

Helming “Romeo” is the company’s artistic director, Tony Estrella. He has given us a highly athletic production, opening with violent brawling between the Montague and Capulet factions before anyone says a word. The time is the late 16th century.

Making his Gamm debut as Romeo is curlyhaired Aaron Rossini, a recent M.F.A. graduate of Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium. He exhibits a broad vocal range, culminating with a properly shrieked “I defy you, stars!” near the end.

Juliet is supposed to be just shy of her fourteenth birthday, and Amanda Ruggiero captures a teenage girl better than most who tackle the role. She has many delectable moments, and scampers about with giddy ardor. In the famous Balcony Scene, she does not stay aloft but comes down to the ground in order to indulge in a lot of kissing with Romeo, who is barefoot – all of which works convincingly.

Wendy Overly, who is the crown jewel of the permanent company, is magnificent as Juliet’s Nurse, even when she lies prone for a back massage by Juliet. Most of the other players give solid support, especially Kelby T. Akin as a mustachioed Mercutio, and Tom Gleadow as Lord Capulet, who can summon up anger when required. As the Prince, Sam Babbitt was underpowered, but was perhaps saving himself for the greater demands as Leonato in “Much Ado” later in the day.

There is not much one can do about the tedious scene that speaks of Romeo’s banishment some two dozen times in the space of a few lines. But the final Tomb Scene was nicely staged, though it was a novelty to have the company sing and the dead Romeo and Juliet stand up for a farewell tableau.

Swingtime in the Gamm Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing

The “Much Ado” production was directed by Fred Sullivan Jr., who is one of the Gamm’s three resident directors. He chose to move the time up to 1945. At the outset there is a radio bulletin announcing the end of World War II, which leads to a host of servicemen in military garb celebrating with singing, dancing, playing soccer with balloons, all carried out in front of an unfurled banner reading VICTORY.

Doffing his administrative duties to play the major role of Benedick, Tony Estrella, wearing a batch of merit badges, brings lots of brio to his assumed disdain for a snooty Beatrice (Jeanine Kane), both of whom are tricked into revealing different feelings and an eventual marriage. Estrella has grown a moustache for this show, although at one point he lathers his face and gives himself a shave.

The play is officially assigned to the category of Comedy, and it was the amusing friction between the two sparring leads that composer Hector Berlioz concentrated on in his delightful final opera, “Beatrice and Benedict.” But the script also has its serious subplot, involving the villainous Don John (Kelby Akin), who spreads a false accusation of adultery to destroy the impending wedding of Claudio (Marc Dante Mancini) and Hero (Amanda Ruggiero), which leads to the supposed death of the latter.

The malapropistic constable Dogberry and his cohorts can be a bore, but Tom Gleadow and colleagues manage to make them highly entertaining. One leaves this show with a smile and gratitude to the entire cast.

Remaining performances: “Romeo” plays on Nov. 27 at 8. Both shows play on Nov. 28 at 2 and 8, and on Nov. 29 at 2 and 7. “Much Ado” plays on Nov. 25 at 7, with added performances on Dec. 2 at 7, and on Dec. 3, 4 and 5 at 8.

Reviewed by Harvey Blume

Author and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu is not particularly troubled by implausibility nor intimidated by contradiction.

In 1916, as Europe waged an horrific war that, nearly a century later, makes even less sense, if possible, than it did at the time, refugees, renegades, draft dodgers, opportunists, revolutionaries and artists massed in neutral Switzerland. Two of them, Tristan Tzara, the father of Dada, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the father of Bolshevism, who arrived in Zurich from opposite poles of the cultural cosmos, collided at the Cafe de La Terrasse in what became legendary games of chess.

Tzara, Codrescu writes, “played for chaos, libido, the creative, and the absurd.” Lenin strove “for reason, order [and the] ‘new man.’” Tzara with his “ostentatious monocle” would much “rather be the object of violent ridicule than the cause of a yawn.” Lenin, on track to be a “mass-murdering ideologue,” was, on top of that, insistently boring — not “just in retrospect [but] boring at the time.” Lenin famously demanded that what he deemed the imperialist war raging in Europe be turned into a class war. Tzara, no less furiously, and as Codrescu sees it, no less influentially over the long haul, renounced the very idea of a grand political program by acting as if the only alternative to global carnage was robust, riotous, revelatory carnival.

Those who know Codrescu from the broadcasts he has been making for NPR since 1983 will recognize the sardonic sensibility in this book, which is rousingly blurbed by the Satanist Aleister Crowley, the dancer Josephine Baker, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, and Swami Vivekananda. From these blurbs on it is apparent that Codrescu is not particularly troubled by implausibility nor intimidated by contradiction. It is the prospect of falling prey to noncontradiction and sleepy consistency that troubles him. His book not only tells a tale of Dada but exemplifies it. Dada, he warns, “has no style, no taste, and no taste for taste.” It is “a priori against everything, including goals and itself.”

Codrescu’s meta-Dada includes, besides the chess players at their game, Andre Breton, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Edgar Allan Poe, fleetingly Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Duchamp in many guises, Cylons from “Battlestar Galactica”, Nosferatu, Freud, and subatomic particles. One recurrent theme is the fate and force of the twentieth-century’s Jewish avantgarde, starting with Tzara (nee Samuel Rosenstock), who, like Codrescu himself, also Jewish, also fled Rumania.

The book has dazzling and delightful humor, and also instances of jumpy mis en scene. (It is doubtful that Codrescu on his current book tour ever breaks “The Posthuman Dada Guide” down into a Power Point format, but it would be nothing less than hilarious to see him do so.) It is perhaps to help his readers through intellectual warp jumps that Codrescu urges people to “read it as someone else.” Adopting a “reading pseudonym” will bring with it the benefits routinely associated with literary pseudonyms: “You will be astonished by how interesting it will become without the intellectual baggage of whatever-your-name-is-now.”

Codrescu evokes the atmosphere of Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, where Tzara ended one performance by “unrolling a roll of toilet paper with the word ‘merde’ written on it,” and through drums, chants, dance, eroticism and art, Dada romanced Nada. Codrescu also pierces that thick smoke and haze to evoke the power of chess, Dada’s favorite sport, challenged only by boxing. (Arthur Cravan, an original Dada, fought and lost to Jack Johnson in Barcelona, 1916).

Of the Tzara/Lenin match Codrescu marvels that though the two “do not agree to society’s rules, yet they obey the laws of chess!” This could only be because in chess, “play carries forward a purpose. Chess is subversive: below its agreed-upon surfaces and motions there roils an acting out of a demonic force, an opposition to language. . . Neither Tzara nor Lenin talks, but each one knows that the other is a talker, a great talker, and they fear each other’s words.”

I had an email exchange with Codrescu in which for no particular reason except perhaps our fear of each other’s upper case, we wound up in strict tacit agreement to use lower case.

hb: do you play chess?

ac: i did but i quit about ten years ago when my 14 year-old started beating me consistently: hung up the rook.

hb: duchamp, of course, would have seriously settled lenin’s chess hash

ac: i wish duchamp would scared the kepi off lenin!

hb: this great and legendary match between tzara & lenin: did it actually occur?! or is the legend sufficient unto the day?

ac: hans richter says so, and tzara himself boasted of it to friends over the years. the only game i could find that lenin played is on the internet, a game with gorky. lenin won of course

hb: no, no, i dug it up. lenin lost!

hb: how did you come by your love of language?


ac: i’m jewish. we have a gene called “the language crystal” that uses letters and syllables as an oracular tool. if we don’t love language, god quits loving us, and then we are fucked. as jews our only job is to make up pleasing music for god–or to make up god through language. either one.

hb: you write that pound & eliot represented different poles of modernism, the former multicultural in a sense (what with chinese and japanese poetry), the latter into ancestor worship. do you really think so?

ac: i do for a crass reason: pound was a loud midwesterner from the college culture of “electives,” eliot a bostonian who imagined himself the heir of a tradition — pound never wrote anything as insidious as “tradition and the individual talent”. even their antisemitisms had different texture — “a stupid suburban prejudice” as pound himself [later] called it, and in eliot’s case, a refined poison distilled from his nostalgia for a walter scott-type south

hb: both really couldn’t rebuild the spires of western culture without antisemtism to make it stick, could they?

ac: you’re right about this.

hb: if someone said dadaism = nihilism, what would you say?

ac: if neitzsche’d had more sex and max stirner a greater sense of humor, they might have been dadaists instead of wet blankets. dada is carnival + god and nihilism is god+ennui.

hb: but is dada nada, or is it ain’t?

ac: dada has plenty of nada and even some nadia (krupskaia) [lenin’s wife} but it ain’t nada a la sartre or nada a la baudelaire’s mistress — it’s a generative nada, a spermy nada=dada

hb: furthermore, if someone said this codrescu is linking dada with quantum mechanics what would you say?

ac: i would say right on! the only behaviors that are interesting are the ones that are completely paradoxical, and what can be more mind-knottingly impossible than particles without mass that can be in more than one place at the same time & that nevertheless make atoms and mass? and generate furthermore a math that works?

hb: what brought you to dada? that tzara was romanian? that he was a jew?

ac: that, and a natural inclination for a provincial to dream up provocations and impossibilities — i claimed tzara in high-school before i’d read a word by him — it pissed off the lovers of the national sheep. dada was in the blood

hb: during your time in ny, did you know get to know marcel duchamp?

ac: i wish — then i might have used him as bait when i was 20 to get laid more often

hb: there are times when it seems you might be trying to rescue lenin from lenin not to mention from leninism & convert him into less than a totally demonic chess foe for tzara. how misguided is this impression?

ac: it’s like an elementary school crush. they brainwashed us in pink sunsets with lenin in them. i also had a crush on a girl named “dulcea” (sweet) and i fondled her once by the boiler in the basement of her apartment building. we never talked about it and it never happened again. it musta been something like that with lenin.

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & Co. 404 pages, $195.

By Helen Epstein

C. G. Jung's image of Philemon, his spiritual guide

In its Red leather cover, its language and its ornate calligraphy, “The Red Book” reads as a revelation of a new (religious) psychology, which – for Jungians – it is. The underlying narrative is, like many myths and memoirs, the spiritual quest of a man who loses his soul and undertakes a journey to find it.

Jung repeatedly rejected the idea that the “Red Book” was an artistic product – either literary or visual. He insisted that his journey through his unconscious was that of a psychologist, and that working through his visions and the meaning of the symbols in them would result in a new understanding of psychotherapy.

The psychiatry of his time, he believes, was incapable of distinguishing between deeply spiritual experiences and psychopathology. He, on the other hand, believed it imperative to utilize the terrors and beauties of his self-induced spiritual visions and integrate them into consciousness. His “journey” into self, his “journaling” of it, and his belief that the individual had the means to cure him or herself from within thus became the model not only for a psychotherapy of self-realization (Jung called it “individuation”) but for much of the New Age literature in our bookstores.

The “Liber Primus,” or first part of the “Red Book”, consists of a Prologue and eleven chapters with titles such as Refinding the Soul, Experiences in the Desert, Instruction, Resolution. They are written in tiny, cramped calligraphy, two or three columns to a page, with some small but no large illustrations. The first initial is an illuminated D for Der Weg (The Way) embellished with a pot of fire and a crowned black serpent, surrounded by the scene of a lake, a lakeside town with church, and the background of mountains against an azure blue sky.

In this first book he restricts his illustrations to historiated initials like that first D, which is followed by Latin calligraphy that invokes Isaiah (Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?) and the Gospel of John (And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…) then Isaiah again. When Jung begins in his own voice, he writes:

“If I speak in the spirit of the this time, I must say no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you….I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. …The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.”

The First Book includes this encounter and dialogue:

“I: Who are you?
“E: I am Elijah and this is my daughter Salome.”
“I: The daughter of Herod, the bloodthirsty woman?”
“E: Why do you judge so? You see that she is blind. She is my daughter, the daughter of the prophet.
“I: What miracle has united you?
“E: It s no miracle. It was so from the beginning. My wisdom and my daughter are one.
“I am shocked. I am incapable of grasping it.”

The figure of Elijah eventually morphs into another old man whom Jung called Philemon and adopted as his spiritual guide. In Roman mythology, the (pagan) Philemon and his wife Baucis, offered hospitality to the gods Jupiter and Mercury when they went from house to house in disguise and no one else would take them in. Jung painted him into the “Red Book” where Philemon represents superior insight. The psychiatrist regarded him as his guru and he reportedly conducted conversations with Philemon as he walked through his garden.

While all this was going on in his mind, Jung was maintaining a growing private practice that was attracting both local and international patients (including some, spectacularly wealthy, Americans), maintaining a presence at Zurich’s Psychoanalytical Association, performing his annual obligatory military service, maintaining a lecture schedule that involved a great deal of travel, having meals with his wife and children every day in the dining room, analyzing his waking fantasies with his lover in his study, and lecturing on behalf of the international psychoanalytic movement.

He finally resigned his presidency of the IPA in 1914 and was ostracized by the Freudians as an apostate.

In addition to keeping track of his own dreams and waking fantasies, Jung began to urge his patients to produce their own, to paint them out, and then use their time in session to examine and integrate them.

One American patient, Christiana Morgan, wrote down his instructions into her own journal of 1926 and later presented him with her own “Redbooks” (that, according to her biographer, Jung used to suit his own theories).

Image from the Red Book

After producing what he called “active imaginations” in session, without hypnosis, Jung advised her to “put it all down as beautifully as you can – in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal – but then you need to do that – then you are freed of the power of them. …when these things are in some precious book, you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you will listen to them — then you will lose your soul – for in that book is your soul.”

The “Liber Secundus” is more varied in style. The tight tiny columns of text give way to large and sometimes huge calligraphy and full and half-page images. It has 21 chapters and begins with another big historiated D for Die Bilder (The Images of the Erring), this one enclosing an eye with a red pupil against a geometric pattern of colors.

The Second Book begins with a text from Jeremiah in Latin “Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord.” And a second, “What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.”

The images, like the text of the “Liber Secundus,” cover a wide range of styles and moods. They include miniatures, sketches, watery evocations of dreams that bring to mind the work of William Blake, full-page tempera landscapes with symbols and figures rendered in great detail; decorative patterns in deep reds and blues that evoke Oriental art; others that resemble the pale Ravenna mosaics that impressed him; as well as work that is indistinguishable from psychedelic art.

The “Liber Secundus” is followed by “Scrutinies,” a reconsideration and revision of the material that precedes it, and a series of mandalas that he originally sketched into notebooks during his annual reserve duty in the Swiss military and then reworked for the “Red Book.”

In addition to echoing the style of many of the texts he took in over the years – the Old Testament, The New Testament, the various non-Western holy books, and the major writers of the European intellectual tradition, Jung can also sound very much like his contemporaries Herman Hesse and, poet/philosopher Khallil Gibran: “The knowledge of the heart is in no book…but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. ”

But some of the “Red Book” has a distinctly contemporary quality, and brought to mind Bob Dylan: “The images of Eve, the tree, and the serpent appear. After this I catch sight of Odysseus and his journey on the high seas. Suddenly a door opens on the right and the old man says to me “Do you know where you are?”

As I dipped in and out of reading Jung’s text and staring at his intriguing, often beautiful, sometimes compelling images, I found myself needing more context. I consulted books by and about Jung – everything from his problematic “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” an uncertain mix of memoir, biography and edited interviews that the publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff tried for years to get him to complete; the biographies by Blair and Hayman, Claire Douglas’ “Translate This Darkness : The Life of Christiana Morgan”; Laurens van der Post’s admiring memoir; and even the satirical and reductive “Jung for Beginners,” which includes a very helpful glossary of Jungian terminology.

I also went to see the exhibit, featuring the original, leather-bound “Red Book,” at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

The RMA, specializing in the art of the several cultures traversed by the Himalayas, is a spectacularly well-endowed, five-year-old museum, housed in the retrofitted former Barney’s clothing store off Seventh Avenue and 17th St in Chelsea. “The Red Book of C.G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology”, is one of three overlapping exhibits called The Cosmology Series, investigating how different cultures have visually represented the universe, from the solar system to the self.

The small, compact and rewarding exhibit runs until February 15, 2010, and begins with two small landscapes of the Swiss countryside that Jung – an amateur painter – had made, along with other oils on cardboard. The original “Red Book” is displayed in a glass case. Other cases allow you to walk through his creative process. They show some of the original black notebooks into which he jotted his dreams and waking visions, the sketches that were source material for the “Liber Novus,” and pages from the typescript that Jung showed to colleagues and revised before writing his final version in calligraphic form.

To complement the exhibit, the RMA has programmed a series of Redbook Dialogues –- conversations between analysts and assorted other people –some quite famous, some relatively obscure. Each begins with a reading from the “Red Book” and a projection of one or more of Jung’s images onto a large screen. The dialogue then takes off to wherever the two people onstage wish to go in the spirit of Jung’s work.

The very interesting dialogue I attended paired Sas Carey, a holistic nurse, Quaker and spiritual guide from Vermont, with Dr. Eric Hollander, a New York psychiatrist and expert on autism. Gray-haired, diminutive Carey has been traveling to Mongolia, partly by plane, partly on horseback, for 15 years to research the practices of local shamans. Eric Hollander, whose tall confident bearing recalls C.G. Jung’s, is former Chair of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center.

The psychiatrist spoke in scientific language, e.g. “core symptoms, social deficits, and repetitive behaviors.” The healer conveyed the persona (to use one of the many Jungian terms that have become part of our daily language) of a practitioner of alternative medicine: “My hands are guided by a knowing force.”

The pairing of these two strikingly different medical professionals, got me free associating back to the binary principle that runs through Jung’s life and work: male and female; good and evil; his personalities #1 and #2; the “spirit of the times” vs. “the spirit of the depths,” anima and animus, the shadow and the light – an approach that seemed out-of-date and of limited value to a dialogue co-sponsored by the National Autism Association and attended by an audience comprised largely of families of autistic children and the professionals who work with them.

Image from the Red Book

After a brief consideration of Jung’s images, Carey talked about going to Mongolia, where she worked with the shaman brought to western attention in the memoir and film “The Horse Boy,” a little boy with autism whose parents take him to Mongolia in search of a cure.

During the Q and A, audience members made clear their frustration with the limits of western science and its alternatives. The two experts onstage did their best to respond to and open up these issues, in what seemed to embody the best of Jung’s multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary legacy but it was clear that, one hundred years after Jung’s time at Burghölzli, there are still far more questions than answers in the treatment of mental illness.

Watching these two sympathetic healers address autism brought to mind Jung’s multitudinous interests: parapsychology as well as psychiatry, the European as well as many non-western traditions of arts, medicine, and culture, the Christianity that imbued his spiritual life and his crucial role in introducing such non-western spiritual classics as the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” and the “I Ching” to the West, his interest in the esoteric theories of alchemy, and his use of psychotherapy both to cure the mentally ill and as a means of connecting the individual unconscious to the world.

“The Red Book” and the RMA’s Red Book exhibit and programming (including interviews and Jung-influenced films) which continues through February 15, 2010 means many different things to different people. Whether you’re a Jungian or a Freudian, think Jung was a genius or charlatan, or even if you’re someone who’s never given much thought to psychotherapy, it’s worth a visit.

Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & Co. 404 pages, $195.

By Helen Epstein

The Light at the Core of the Darkness in C.G. Jung's Red Book

In 1900, at 25, Jung was an assistant staff physician and psychiatric trainee of Dr. Eugen Bleuler, working with severely disturbed patients at the Burghölzli, the world-famous insane asylum and university clinic of Zurich. His medical dissertation “On the Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena,“ inspired by the research of French-Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy, was accepted a year later.

The volume’s editor, Sonu Shamdasani, does not give us a sense of what Jung was like at the time but his biographers, Ronald Hayman and Deirdre Bair both portray him as a tall, blond, loud, self-confident figure, who aroused strong competitive feelings among his peers, partly because of his blunt and out-sized personality, partly because he was a favorite of Burghölzli’s director Eugen Bleuler.

Bleuler took a special interest in Jung’s research in word association, long, rigorously controlled experiments demonstrating the role of the unconscious that some regard as his most important contribution to psychoanalysis.

Pierre Janet, one of Jung's intellectual mentors.

Bleuler and Flournoy both initially served as Jung’s intellectual mentors yet, in 1902, Jung chose to study with a third, Pierre Janet, in Paris. In addition to attending Janet’s lectures and working in his laboratory, Jung explored the city, especially its vast collections of Near Eastern and European art, sometimes copying what he saw in oils and watercolors. He also spent two months in London, where he perfected his English and first saw Aztec and Inca art.

When he returned to Zurich in 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach and took a higher-ranking position at the Burghölzli. His wife belonged to one of the richest families in Switzerland. Her money would later enable Jung to build a large house on Lake Zurich, leave Burghölzli (where he disliked his administrative duties) and establish a private practice.

He was a very successful young psychiatrist — distinguished lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Zurich, busy consultant and senior staff physician at the Burghölzli — when Jung, early in 1906, initiated a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Freud was about to turn 50 and although internationally famous, unacknowledged in academic circles; Jung was 19 years younger, a rising star at the University of Zurich.

He sent Freud a copy of his book “Diagnostic Association Studies,” research that confirmed Freud’s theories about the mechanisms of repression and included a chapter that drew extensively on one of Freud’s published cases. A year later, Jung traveled to Vienna with his wife and a young protégé of his own who recorded that Freud named Jung his “scientific son and heir.”

After Jung arrived at Freud’s home for lunch on March 3, 1907, the two went into Freud’s consulting room and talked until one o’clock in the morning. During that first long meeting Freud became convinced that Jung was his great white hope for psychoanalysis. While Freud was Austrian, Jewish, and worked outside the academy, Jung was Swiss, Christian, and on the medical faculty at the University of Zurich.

He had just completed a new book on schizophrenia, “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” that would attract even more world attention to the already prestigious Burghölzli. Jung was in Freud’s assessment the psychiatrist who could bring the Swiss into the Freudian fold and transform the largely Viennese-Jewish society into an international movement.

C.G. Jung

Apart from organizing his colleagues back in Zurich, Freud also wanted Jung to organize and edit an international journal dedicated to psychoanalysis. Jung biographer Dierdre Bair notes that Jung fell into intense and instant intimacy with Freud. In a letter to him six months later, Jung compared his “veneration” of the older man to a “religious crush,” and, in a peculiar foreshadowing of the future of their relationship, revealed that he had once been sexually victimized by a man he had “worshiped” and since then had difficulty with any man who tried to become a close friend.

Jung returned to Switzerland committed to Freud and stayed committed for six years. But he had many other things on his mind during those years. At the time, he was, after Eugen Bleuler, second in command at Burghölzli, charged with what he found onerous administrative tasks, and the more interesting but very time-consuming supervision of new physicians at the hospital and new medical students at the university.

He had his own patients. He lectured extensively. He welcomed international visitors. He testified in court cases. He had purchased a piece of land and was supervising the building of a large house. His wife was pregnant with their third child and insisted he spend “family time” with them.

Jung’s response to the pressure was to succumb to flu for much of the year. He was frustrated to have no time for his own research and irritated by the politics at Burghölzli, where other doctors felt he was not doing his job. Despite all of that, he organized a Swiss society for Freudian Researches and investigated the means of publishing The Jahrbuch, a psychoanalytic journal that Freud desired.

Shamdasani in his introduction to the “Red Book” downplays the role Freud played in Jung’s life and spiritual crisis. Jung’s relationship with Freud has been “much mythologized,” he argues, and a “Freudocentric legend” established that has led to “the complete mislocation” of Jung’s work “in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.” To fill in the blanks, I turned back to Deirdre Bair’s biography.

In her account, Freud pursued the younger man by mail, urging him to convert his boss, Dr. Bleuler, as well as the rest of Swiss psychologists to his cause. Jung was an erratic correspondent, too preoccupied by his many duties and interests to write back right away.

In September 1908, Freud made a visit to assess Jung’s progress. The two men again talked non-stop for four days in another operatic episode of intense intimacy after distance. Freud observed some of Jung’s patients at the Burghölzli (but did not even stop in to say hello to its director). The two men were totally absorbed in one another, thrashing out editorial details of the upcoming “Jahrbuch” and discussing the psychoanalytic movement.

After Freud left, Jung had an unpleasant surprise. Bleuler fired him. Since Zurich was a small place, both men were interested in saving face and since Jung and his family were still living on the asylum grounds as was the custom in Zurich, and his new house on Lake Zurich was still in the process of being built, Jung negotiated a deal that allowed him to formally resign the following spring.

As Shamdasani spins it, “In 1909, Jung resigned from the Burghölzli to devote himself to his growing practice and his research interests …that shifted to mythology, folklore and religion…these researches culminated in ‘Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.’” In its pages, Jung would publicly part ways with Freud by denying the primacy of sex in Freud’s theory of libido, and taking issue not only with his interpretation of dreams and the importance of religion, but with Freud’s views on the centrality of infantile sexuality.

Bair writes that Jung was so terrified by the probable consequences of writing the second part of his book that he began to practice yoga to gain the courage necessary even to approach it. In a letter to Freud in 1912, he described “grisly fights with the hydra of mythological fantasy” but did not go into specifics. “Years later he tried to describe what happened,” Bair writes, “but even with distance and time he could not express it in a logical and coherent manner.”

Samdasani’s introduction suffers from some of the same incoherence, possibly because he so wants to avoid a “Freudocentric” approach, possibly because it’s difficult to write coherently about so multifarious a life and seemingly incoherent a body of work. He skips over the deepening of Freud and Jung’s intense and fascinating relationship, omitting not only their increasingly lop-sided correspondence but their intense month-long voyage in each other’s company to the U.S.

In 1909, they set sail from Bremen to be awarded honorary degrees at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. G. Stanley Hall, Clark University’s president and himself a psychologist, had invited both of them. Freud’s five lectures were titled “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis” and Jung’s three lectures “The Association Method.”

Freud later wrote: “In Europe I felt as though I were despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my “Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis” it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”

Freudians have written Jung so well out of their history that many people don’t know that Jung was even present at Clark University. In fact, the two men spent four weeks in each other’s company almost every day, arguing, analyzing, sightseeing, accompanied by Sandor Ferenczi, who had studied with both. Jung was an enthusiastic tourist, hiking with his hosts as well as discussing parapsychology, religion and spiritualism with experts like William James and comparing him and other older psychologists favorably to Freud. But during that month, Jung, by all accounts, kept his growing reservations about Freud to and perhaps from himself.

In addition to their differences about the interpretation of dreams, the centrality of infantile and childhood sexuality; and the importance of spirituality, the two men were the products of very different families, intellectual and cultural traditions, and cities. They also had very different personal agendas. Ebullient Jung had wide-ranging interests and a very active family and extra-marital life. Austere Freud was more narrowly focused on psychoanalysis and saw Jung as a proselytizing agent for it.

Pages from C.G. Jung's Red Book

Jung had put together the first edition of the “Jahrbuch” to Freud’s satisfaction and the older man planned to install him as first President of the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1910. But Jung had many other things on his mind (including ongoing problems with patients, colleagues and several women including his wife) and his experiences in the U.S. had complicated his relationship with Freud.

As Shamdasani narrates it, Jung returned to his cultural and religious preoccupations after the trip to America and, in addition to growing his private practice, published –- despite his trepidations –”Transformations and Symbols of the Libido.” The book was based on fantasies of an American woman named Frank Miller who had originally presented them to Theodore Flournoy, who had translated them into French but then gave them to Jung.

Shrinks had a very casual code of behavior regarding patient confidentiality, boundary violations, and many other things during those pioneer days. Jung compared Ms. Miller’s fantasies to images in comparative mythology, religion, and folklore. He differentiated between verbal, scientific, and logical “directed thinking” and passive, imagistic, and mythological “fantasy thinking.” He later viewed this book as “marking his discovery of the collective unconscious,” but he scrawled at the end of the manuscript: “What have you written, what is this now?”

That summer of 1912, he wrote “Nine Lectures,” which he would present in New York City that fall. The document would answer his own question and further demarcate his own ideas from Freud’s.

That period can, in retrospect, be seen as marking the genesis of the “Red Book” although, as Deirdre Bair points out, Jung recycled the narrative so many times that it’s very hard to determine what happened when. The theoretical rifts between the psychoanalysts of the International Association took on the character of religious wars: brutal, uncompromising, and vituperative. Shamdasani’s introduction implies that Jung’s “Most Difficult Experiment” began with a dream he recorded in “Black Book #2″ in 1912 that implicitly challenged Freud.

“I was in a southern town…an old Austrian customs guard or someone similar passes by me…Someone says ‘that is one who cannot die. He died already 30-40 years ago, but has not yet managed to decompose.’ I was very surprised. Here a striking figure came, a knight of powerful build, clad in yellowish armor. He looks solid and inscrutable and nothing impresses him. On his back he carries a red Maltese cross….I hold back my interpretative skills. As regards the old Austrian Freud occurred to me; as regards the knight, I myself.”

Shamdasani continues, straining credulity: “Jung found the dream oppressive and bewildering and Freud was unable to interpret it.” In the same ‘Black Book,’ half a year later, Jung describes a second dream about a beautiful white bird that flew into his family’s apartment and turned into a blond little girl, then back into a bird that flew away.” Jung had no trouble interpreting that dream right away and embarked on a life-long sexual liaison with his former patient and professional colleague Toni Wolff.

In January of 1913, Freud broke off their deteriorating correspondence, setting the acerbic international community of analysts abuzz with speculation of what would happen next. Jung maintained his affiliation with the psychoanalytic movement until October when, after an unpleasant, contentious re-election as president of the IPA, he finally resigned as editor of the “Jahrbuch.”

Then, he had the dream that he describes at the beginning of the “Red Book:”

“It happened in October of the year 1913 as I was leaving alone for a journey [he was on his way to visit his mother-in-law in Schaffhausen, where the Rhine creates a famous waterfall] that during the day I was suddenly overcome in broad daylight by a vision. I saw a terrible flood that covered all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. It reached from England up to Russia, and from the coast of the North Sea right up to the Alps. I saw yellow waves, swimming rubble, and the death of countless thousands.

The vision lasted for two hours. It confused me and made me ill. I was not able to interpret it. Two weeks passed then the vision returned more violent than before, and an inner voice spoke. ‘Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this.’ I wrestled again for two hours with this vision but it held me fast. It left me exhausted and confused. And I thought my mind had gone crazy.

“From then on the anxiety toward the terrible event that stood directly before us kept coming back. Once I also saw a sea of blood over the northern lands

“In the year 1914 in the month of June, at the beginning and end of the month, and at the beginning of July, I had the same dream three times…”

Jung retold and rewrote this dream in many different ways in subsequent years but in the “Red Book,” he seems to be using its precognitive vision of World War I to establish the prophetic nature and validity of what he called his “waking fantasies” or “active imaginations. The ensuing account of how Jung lost and found his “soul” contains the materials for all of Jung’s analytic psychology.

Shamdasani summarizes the “Red Book” as an attempt to understand himself; the structure of the human personality in general; the relation of the individual to society and the community of the dead; the psychological and historical effects of Christianity and the future religious development of the West.

He notes that in November of 1914 Jung studied Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” which he had first encountered as a young man, and which now “shaped the structure and style of ‘Liber Novus’ (New Book)….There are also indications that he read Dante’s ‘Commedia’ at this time, which also informs the structure of the work…but where Dante could utilize an established cosmology, ‘Liber Novus’ is an attempt to shape an individual cosmology.”

Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & Co. 404 pages, $195.

By Helen Epstein

I was intrigued in September to hear about the publication – ninety years after it was begun – of Carl Gustav Jung’s “Liber Novus” or the “Red Book.”

I’m a student of memoir and his “Liber Novus” sounded like a 20th century contribution to an autobiographical genre that dates back to St. Augustine’s “Confessions” as well as a book of religious or spiritual revelation. Like Augustine and Dante, Jung experienced a profound break in his belief system or what we now call a mid-life crisis.

He had addressed it like many writers: making notes of his thoughts and feelings, reworking his notes into a narrative, showing it to friendly readers (including his wife, his lover, and several colleagues), revising it, having it typed and then – feeling ambivalent about exposing himself so candidly–consigning it to a drawer.

Except that he never entirely consigned it to a drawer. Instead, Jung used his raw material to build a body of psychology, drew on it for a succession of professional publications, and repeatedly showed parts of his “Liber Novus” manuscript to friends and colleagues.

He took it out again in 1959 – two years before he died – and in a handwritten Epilogue that breaks off in mid-sentence added:

“I worked on this book for 16 years. To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness. It would have developed into one, had I not been able to absorb the overpowering force of the original experiences. With the help of alchemy, I could finally arrange them into a whole. …I knew how frightfully inadequate this undertaking was, but despite much work and many distractions I remained true to it, even if another possibility …”

In its outlines, Jung’s process was like that of an artist. His practice of going into his study after a day of seeing patients and having dinner with his family, then inducing altered states of consciousness and writing down what he encountered in them is not that different from what most novelists and many memoirists do.

What was, of course, very different was the nature and scope of his project: Jung was wrestling with the Christianity he had grown up with, creating his own cosmology, generalizing his own inner conflict to the conflict between what he called “the spirit of the time” and “the spirit of the depths.”

C.G. Jung

Before consigning his text to a drawer, Jung rewrote it by hand onto folio-sized sheets of parchment, and then pasted them onto thick white pages that evoke the pages of medieval Gospel books like the “Book of Kells” or prayer books like “Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry.”

He did the Latin and German calligraphy himself, illustrating it with vivid, color-saturated miniatures and full-page paintings. He spent what must have been hours laboring over historiated initials – those highlighted first letters of a new verse or phrase illustrated to elaborate meaning.

Even though the book was going into a drawer, he commissioned a bookbinder to produce a volume of expensive red leather embossed with gold leaf to contain his lavishly illustrated folios.

It was that unusual mix of spiritual memoir tradition and sheer grandiosity that piqued my curiosity about the “Red Book”: the translation of visions into images as well as words, the deliberate evocation of The New Testament, the mix of medieval religious style and twentieth century psychology.

I also knew something about the controversies swirling around Jung: his intense attachment to and break-up with Sigmund Freud; his intense relationships and sometime sexual liaisons with a succession of women patients; his equivocal behavior during the second world war; his way of recycling and reworking what he wrote until anyone could take anything from it.

There were many people, I found, who agreed with Jung’s contemporary Walter Lippmann that the psychiatrist’s work was “ a personal adventure in search of a philosophy far more than a contribution to psychoanalytic understanding.” Others proudly called themselves Jungians.

So I ordered a copy of the book.

The volume that arrived on my doorstep measured 18 x 12.3 x 2.4 inches, weighed 9.6 pounds, and was 404 pages long. “The Red Book” was too heavy to hold in my lap for more than five minutes so I read it in small increments at my dining room table. And while I had my customary pencil in hand, I was surprised to find myself oddly reluctant to make any mark on the large and beautiful white pages.

About half of those pages are facsimiles of the original German and Latin calligraphy; the other half includes the English translation of “Liber Primus,” “Liber Secundus,” and “Scutinites,” and an extensive, wide-ranging introduction by Jung historian Sonu Shamdasani, a professor at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College in London. He is also General Editor and co-founder of the Philemon Foundation outside of Philadelphia, which is engaged in publishing everything Jung ever wrote.

The images in the “Red Book” are museum quality and practically throb with color; the text, sometimes captivating, sometimes tedious, echoes the multitude of voices from sacred and secular literature that influenced Jung: Old Testament, New Testament, many eastern religious classics, Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Pascal, Swedenborg – to name just a few.

Shamdasani makes over one thousand footnotes, citing changes in the text and as many sources and influences that he can track down. Flipping back and forth between the original German, the art, the English text and those annotations I found myself disoriented and exhausted.

Although the “Red Book” is clearly the record of a spiritual crisis and the author’s repeated attempts to wrest meaning from it, much of its content seems to be more raw than integrated. Throughout, it seems that Jung tinkered with his story – insisting on the veracity of his time frame but, in fact, often collapsing time and creating composites, issues that are live controversies among writers of memoir today.

“The years of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life,” reads a paragraph placed at the front of the “Red Book.”

It was written in 1957 – four years before he died — at a time he still felt it prudent to keep the object under wrap:

“Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me liker an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”

Freud (L) and Jung (R): Jung had an intense attachment to and break-up with Sigmund Freud

In his comprehensive and valiant attempt at summarizing the contents and contextualizing Jung, Shamdasani argues that there can be few unpublished works that have ever exerted such influence on social and intellectual history. Jung, he writes, “played a central role in modern psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry and a large international profession of analytical psychologists work under his name. His work has had its widest impact, however, outside professional circles.”

Words and terms Jung made popular — “introvert,” and “extravert,” “synchronicity,” “persona,” and “collective unconscious” have permeated popular culture. Writers, artists, performers, users of recreational drugs, and spiritual seekers of all stripes have been drawn to Jung’s explorations in expanding consciousness.

Herman Hesse was briefly one of his analysands and his “Steppenwolf” and “Magister Ludi” owe much to Jung, as do Doris Lessing’s novels, Federico Fellini’s films and Joseph Campbell’s research on comparative mythology and religions. Laurens Van der Post thought Jung was the only human being he had ever met “of whose greatness” he was certain, and wrote the memoir “Jung and the Story of our Time,” to show why.

C.G. Jung was born in 1875, the son of a poor, small-town pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church who ended every family dinner with a reading from Luther’s Bible. His parents’ marriage was an unhappy one and Carl grew up a solitary child with a much younger sister, given to ruminating about both his day and night dreams as well as his frequent visual hallucinations.

His mother and much of the maternal (Preiswerk) side of the family were as interested in parapsychology as his father was in the Protestant Church and their precognitive dreams, crystal gazing, trance states and séances were part of daily conversation. Jung also grew up frightened of Catholic priests and by 12, had lost faith in his father’s brand of religion.

As a child Jung believed that he had two distinct personalities. Personality #1 was the school boy who studied the subjects assigned by his rigorous gymnasium: the Greek and Latin classics, the German philosophers, literary masters, world history and science. Personality #2 was the boy who pursued his inner mysteries and communed with nature. That division was to imbue his life and writing.

Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead

In 1895, he entered the pre-med program at the University of Basel, where he read the psychological works of William James and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, whose “Textbook of Psychiatry” seemed to promise a way to blend his two personalities. While at university, he also studied literature and art. He was particularly influenced by the symbolic and mystical work of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. He also took part in many séances, some organized by a female cousin.

Shamdasani begins his introduction to the “Red Book” with a brief consideration of the “cultural moment” – the first decades of the twentieth century in Central Europe when psychologists, artists and writers lived and worked in more overlapping ways than now and shared an interest in the relatively new fields of comparative religion and folklore, the dissemination of literary and artistic artifacts from the East, occult phenomena, somnambulism, visions and fantasies. Many used “automatic writing,” in their quest for new forms and ways of perception.

Jung not only shared artistic ideas but would meet and treat some of Zurich’s artists and writers as his patients.

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Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.”

Reviewed by Justin Marble

Manny Farber (1917-2008): One of the unruly giants of 20th century film criticism.

Film critic Manny Farber’s landmark 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” champions the underground, manic, frenzied, messy “termite” films against the by-the-book, consciously significant, pompous and often critically-adored “white elephant art” of the mainstream. He claims, in his antically colorful way, that “termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art … goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” Like the marginalized films he loved, Farber’s own writing is a form of “termite art.”

Farber dives into each film he reviews, whether he “likes” it, or not, and bites his way into its heart at breakneck speed, leaving a trail of dizzying vocabulary and provocative observation until the reader is left with his mind reeling. What’s more, there’s little left to gnaw on– since Farber has already chewed everything up himself.

Spanning from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, “Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber” tackles the golden age of cinema from an alternative but wholly engaging perspective. At times contrarian to a fault, with a “who’s that?” pantheon of filmmakers like Val Lewton and Raoul Walsh, Farber took the word “critic” seriously, unafraid to detail just what he thought was wrong with the latest Truffaut or DeSica film everybody else was raving about.

This non-conformity can be infuriating - I wanted to reach through the page and strangle him for attacking Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” - but his writing irritates not because it is poorly thought out, but because it is so nuanced, so observant, so richly detailed in the tiniest moments. In the “Strawberries” essay, among others, one gets the feeling that Farber could miss the point of a film completely, because he can spend too much time on how the film was photographed, or how an actor delivered a certain line, rather than what the film is ultimately about. But it’s easy to forgive him simply because his dedication, passion, and attention to detail are extremely rare, if not discouragingly unique.

In fact, Farber would argue that these tiny moments are what’s important about film, and by extension, about criticism. In a time of decadence, when movie reviews have been poisoned by the Siskel-and-Ebert “thumbs up/thumbs down” or Metacritic mentality, the latter boiling down complex opinions into a numerical value, Farber’s writing reminds us of the limitations of naked judgment. In some reviews the reader never even gets the sense of whether Farber thought the film was any good or not, because he spends the review analyzing one thing — a set, a line, an actor — that he found particularly interesting.

In some ways this approach is more powerful, or at the very least as rewarding, than a verdict. Farber’s reviews would never show up on a movie trailer, he would never exclaim “Go see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance!” Instead he will analyze the way John Wayne walks, the way he sits back in his chair, and in doing so will tempt you to pop in the DVD to see what he’s talking about. Farber’s role is more of an intellectual swashbuckler than neat-cornered consumer guide.

Be warned: there is a density to Farber’s writing that might prove formidable to those weaned on fluffy, airy, modern newspaper-based film criticism. He tends to use a ten-dollar word when a two-cent one would do. Sometimes the wheels come off his sentences and he crashes into a corner: the piece ends with nothing arrived at, just perceptions arranged in a web-like fashion. But it’s part of his indispensably eccentric process, the price that comes with approaching each film in his own frenzied way.

As a young critic, one of the sublime virtues of “Farber on Film” is the opportunity to read an insightful critic exclaiming and arguing through the decades of cinema when the masters were at work. Essays on Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Capra, Wilder, Fassbinder, Kurosawa, and others provide a cinematically thrilling time capsule. It’s particularly refreshing to read penetrating criticism of artists widely talked about as nigh-bulletproof in the present day. And reading Farber at the end of his career delving deep into Werner Herzog, who was just beginning his, offers a paradoxical vision of craft, the meeting of two ornery masters, one winding down, the other starting up.

Farber On Werner Herzog

The overwhelming isolation of every moral in the human kingdom is the sensation of any Herzog frame. When two types of loss-alienation can be split apart within one frame, the movie inevitably is at its most hurtful and associative. Perhaps his entire oeuvre defines itself around the miracle scene, utterly dirty, of a wiry Algerian hammering stones into gravel. His clenched doggedness is suddenly matched by an equally weathered intruder who takes a stiff, belligerent stand toward the camera. It catches a whole area’s existence, dry, mid-Sahara, and the outsider’s impotent relation to it. Over this image is a rasping incantation: The gates of paradise are open to everybody … there works are inspected which no one would do … you slake lime and are chosen by this for the rich.”

Herzog is one tough guy with an ability to be pliant, gentle.

Werner Herzog, 1975

Beyond that, and in some ways more crucial, Farber challenges today’s critics to be more than idle, passive observers, anemic blurbers and box office followers, but to attack, engage, and shape the culture’s conception of film. It’s not about agreeing with Farber - sometimes he doesn’t even seem to agree with himself - but to absorb his desire that the reviewer should fight for a recognition of movie art, no matter where it might be.

In a way, Farber was both termite and an (unwhite) elephant: a termite in the sense that he chomped on every film he saw, ripping through it with abandon, and an elephant in that his massive and significant contribution to criticism cannot be ignored, or forgotten.

Much new material since the October update for those with an interest in international literature.

Justine Hardy: Kashmir has been her beat for 20 years.

My latest podcast features an interview with journalist and author Justine Hardy, whose latest book (published by the Free Press), “In the Valley of Mist: One Family in a Changing World,” continues her exploration of life in Kashmir, a perspective that makes a determined effort to look beyond the stereotypes of crisis. I was particularly curious about what Hardy has learned covering the volatile region as a journalist and novelist. What does fiction do that non-fiction can’t?

Also in World Books: a thoughtful piece by translator and critic Tess Lewis that goes beyond the whiffs of information whipped up at a moment’s notice by the American media about the books of Herta Müller, who recently won the Nobel Prize for literature.

And I posted an interview with a leading Cuban writer about one of my favorite books in translation this year. I questioned, via email, writer José Manuel Prieto about the English translation of the late Guillermo Rosales’s “The Halfway House,” a powerful novel about exile, revolution, and mental illness.

Coming up on World Books: An extensive piece by Helen Epstein that examines the recent publication and translation (ninety years after it was begun) of C. G. Jung’s confessional meditation “The Red Book.” According to the volume’s editor and co-translator Sonu Shamdasani, “The Red Book” stands in a select company of books that exerted an enormous influence on social and intellectual history even while it was unpublished.