Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig
Translated from the German Karen Leeder
96 pgs. | hc | 9780857425560 | $19.00

Review by Talia Franks

Thick of It by Ulrike Almut Sandig is a slender book of poetry, vibrantly translated from the original German into English by Karen Leeder. The poems are prefaced by a translator’s introduction that dives in to the life of the poet along with a chronicle of her past and present works, including a light analysis of the poems within the book. The introduction was in many ways as invigorating as the poems themselves, because it gave a shape and context to the book for which I otherwise would not have had a frame of reference. While the poems certainly hold up on their own, I appreciated having this primer to them, because I felt more prepared to dive in and give the text my full attention once I knew the source of the poetry and its history.

The poems themselves are separated into three sections. The first is a collection of poems that appear under “north,” followed by a single poem under “center of the world,” and finally a third section called “south.” In this way, the reader follows the poet on a journey throughout the poems, which each evoking a new emotion that varies on the themes of the collection, including disappearance, absence, language, communication, belonging, identity, and love. Even with such a rigid external structure, the poems within the “north” and “south” sections were allowed their own fluidity, giving them breathing room to explore in their own directions.

Each poem varied in exact format, but was characterized by the fact that the title of each poem was a bolded word or collection of words within the poem itself, rather than appearing at the top of the page. This allowed for a much more fluid experience while reading the poems, because it was only after reading the poem in its entirety and reflecting upon the bolded section that I was able to formulate a full concept of the meaning behind each poem.

I’ll admit that a large part of me struggled to stay focused while reading Thick of It because the poems often evoked emotions in me that caused my mind to wander, and thus it took me much longer to read this slim volume than it has to read comparable texts. There is a raw yet slightly distant emotion in each poem that begs introspection. This also made it a little hard to stay engaged with the book as a cohesive whole, because every poem set my thoughts on a tailspin, so even though I could read through it quickly, it took me months to grapple with each poem on an individual level. There are many with odd turns of phrase that are difficult to wrap one’s mind around, such as “you wrote yourself the poem of it,” which was the bolded line/title on page three. Other lines are as visceral as they are impactful, such as “language is a/ horse that foams at the mouth,” a line from the first poem of “south.”

As peculiar as some of these lines are, and as much as the poems did evoke a great deal of emotion and introspection, the poetry itself was ephemeral, and upon reflection does not stand out in particular from other poets I have read. That is not to call the poetry bad by any means—I greatly enjoyed reading the collection, but their impact stuck with me more than their actual content. After reading this book I was awash with reflection about interpersonal relationships, my state of being, and a manner of general unease about existence.

People who are looking to read poetry that will cause them to really sit down and think about the world and their place in it, looking to take a deep dive into the psyche and come out at the other end, may just find that Thick of It is exactly the book they need.

by Bhaskar Chakrabart, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha (India, Seagull Books)

I love ordinariness. Rejected, pedestrian conversations and scenes, days and nights left behind are all things that move me. And I feel a desire to dress them in new clothes. Perhaps I wanted to capture an enormous pleasure in my poetry . . .

                     “Poetry on Poetry”

The city of Calcutta is constant presence in Bhaskar Chakrabarti’s poetry, although an elusive and ghostly one. Chakrabarti is every bit the city poet that Baudelaire is, but he wends his way through his beloved metropolis as a swimmer rather than a �ڱ�â�Ա�ܰ�. In some poems he merely dips a toe into the stream that swirls around and past him. In others he submerges himself fully and lets himself be carried by the current. In still others he sits on the bank, his back to the city, and looks inward or simply remembers. The Calcutta Chakrabarti evokes and celebrates is not, however, the one we have often heard or read about elsewhere. There is little sign of the bustling streets filled with life and affliction, the faded grandeur offset by vivid colors and heady Coffee House intellectuals usually associated with this city of many goddesses and cultures. Chakrabarti’s Calcutta is a city of memories and particulars, of loneliness and melancholy, of beautiful women glimpsed from a distance and fleeting deities.

For Chakrabarti (1945–2005), there is little point in looking for the exotic half-way around the world or even in nearby neighborhoods. The crucial thing is to find a connection to the mundane, the familiar; “even writing four or five ordinary lines / About tender blades of grass is better” than “struggling on with symbol, imagery and resonance” in poems from the day before yesterday. Observed with the proper attention, the foreign becomes familiar and the familiar is seen fresh.

Arunava Sinha’s translation from the Bengali deftly navigates these poems’ shifts in register from elevated reflection to earthy exclamation. In the title poem, the poet reflects on the small but real joys a life dedicated to art can bring, yet quickly deflates the swelling sentimentality.

The days aren’t passing badly for the two of us
Though it’s true we haven’t been to the hills,
We haven’t been to the seaside for three years now
And poverty, it’s no small annoyance
Constantly borrowing money and asking my sister for help
Still, one or two interesting things do happen
Tonight, for instance, you exclaimed: There, it’s raining:
We went up to the window
But it was only the sound of someone pissing on the roof next door
Or the other night, I was writing in the tiny room
With the light on—someone from the street said loudly:
Go to sleep, motherfucker.

                     “Things That Happen”

Most of the poems in this collection, however, are in a more reflective tone of sober nostalgia. Indeed, many were written after Chakrabarti began treatment for an illness that brought him frequent hospitalization and regular confrontations with mortality. Sinha’s sonorous, sinuous lines evoke the elusive comforts Chakrabarti finds in poetry that calls up, however futilely, absent beloveds and lost familiars.

Because you’ll come, I’ve snagged a wicker chair
I wonder, will you come? Will you really come?
Two decades have passed—or four? I still sit in the darkness
Why this loneliness, why this pulse in my veins
You are mild (fragrant air), peace, peace in my nerves, panacea

                     “The Language of Giraffes”

Readers of Things That Happen are quickly swept up by the soothing, inviting flow of Chakrabarti’s poetry, but sooner or later a gentle tug of danger even despair between the lines will send them back to firm ground, unsettled but with senses sharpened.

If historical fiction is straightforward, convinced of its own solidity, that the historical side coheres without the cracks of fiction, particularly the fractured narratives of post-modernity, then there is nothing to trust, naïveté or deception are in play. Done carelessly, plain facts mixed with the overwriting of a historical person to create the whole of a plot- and character-focused novel, leaves a thin fiction, easily undone by any inaccuracies and its leap over what is not and cannot be known.

Early on, it’s clear that Steen takes historical setting as an opportunity, a route opened to explore aspects of a man and life that reoccur in other lives and histories, in scopes miniscule and sweeping. The tale and its setting are neither a backdrop to make the novel stand out from others with a contemporary setting, nor a straightforward recounting. That Steen is aware that presumption comes along with writing about men and women who lived their own lives can be felt in glimmers and glimpses. Snorre himself offers Steen a chance to admit the complications. Snorre wrote histories and sagas, full of his own embellishments, and facing his death, he “began to wonder what his last words on earth would be. The ones he’d put in the mouths of various characters in Heimskingla [the sagas of Norse kings written by Snorre] would raise expectations of his own valediction.” There are consequences to writing the consciousnesses of those who once lived, and Steen sees that, in the risk of moral failing in writing a presumptuous historical fiction, there is room for moral accomplishment in writing a careful one. In his afterword, he writes “it is more odious not to engage in the fate of an individual, concerning the right of man, than not to do so.”

The fate is not only that Snorre has already been murdered, but that it was ever bound to happen: “On that same morning, a day’s ride away, it was decided that Snorre should die on Saint Maurice’s eve. Nobody breathed a word of this to him.” At this point we don’t know who decided this, or why. It feels as if no specific person or group did, simply that the decision happened, and then men were compelled to the actions to complete it. Even Snorre is dimly aware that something in the spirit of the world around him has turned on him, cursing Torkild, his smith, as he abandons the property, then spending his last days side-eying the rest of his people, wondering who will betray him next. It plays out as a dull paranoia: a rich, powerful man afraid of the weak and poor he rules over—but of course it isn’t paranoia.

As much as his murder is fate, is the inevitability of death, it is also the crushing weight of time, of history. This weight falls most heavily on Snorre, but if he were the only one burdened, the novel would not be the moral meditation that it is. Steen uses the perspective of historical fiction to take any life to its historical end. He does this with individual men, like a priest and his followers, stopped on their way to deliver a message to Snorre: “The ship they look foundered on the rocks off the English coast. The papal envoys drowned before help arrived. Here ends the story of the three messengers Snorre never met.” He does it with animals, whole species: “It had never flown. A short time later it lay still in the yard. It died without knowing fear, just as the last great auk would six hundred years later.”

Time and history manifest through Snorre’s memories, too. He is an aging man, given to dwelling—on his personal, political, and writing life. Steen drops the daily narrative to wander to age-old deals, plots, betrayals, affairs, and broken relationships. It is a historical recounting of facts and scenarios, while also a lyrical movement that suggests Snorre’s actions and interactions led him to this murder, even those not logically related. He may not have deserved to be murdered, but his personality made it inevitable. If along the way he had been a different man, a less cruel man, he would have more than these five days. This man made his son, Órækja, little more than a weapon, a crude and wild one that he can hardly control. Snorre does not himself kill, does not even necessarily order his son to do so, just points him in the direction of complicated situations that violence could, at least temporarily, resolve. Órækja reminds him of his own responsibility in this violence, so he drives him away, refusing him the love he craves. It is this that prevents this warrior son from being at Snorre’s side when his enemies are at the gate.

As the murder draws nearer, Steen begins to slow time down, with more departures from the day at hand, and scenes of action slow to a crawl. Snorre begins to disappear, already fading from the world, the historical Snorre replacing the man. Steen leaves him to spend more time with the men coming to kill him, telling parts of their stories. We watch Órækja almost stumble onto the plot. We realize that the woman he loves does indeed love him back, even for all she understands him. That Snorre is a cruel man is clear to everyone but him, though he has an inkling. At one point, he meditates on a legend he “never tired of.” It tells of a whale who killed all the sons of a priest, who then tortured and killed the creature. Snorre doesn’t know why he likes the story, dismissing that it is because “good” wins, but that it is unrelenting and brutal is a likely reason.

If Snorre has a place where he steps away from this version of himself, it is in his writing. This is his place of comfort. It is his legacy not based on harming or controlling others, though in his reliance on it as a retreat, that selfishness bleeds in. Writing became something other than a comfort; it was his way of hiding from the world. Remembering the last time he saw his son Jon before he too was murdered, Snorre too proud, too scared to open himself, focused on his writing “as if nothing had been said.” His life as a writer exposes his fears, his vulnerability held together with stiff, cold pride. That he wrote the historical fiction of his time links him to Steen, becoming unspoken compassion for him. Snorre as Steen creates him as a type of complicated man, unable to see his own confusion who can be selfish in the face of a God he believes in: “He invoked God’s name. He asked for God’s help, and then roundly abused him.” Steen exposes Snorre’s faults not to condemn, but to humanize.

Lori helped us out in the World Cup of Literature round for the U.S. vs. Belgium, and is also a member of the Board of Dallas-based Deep Vellum Publishing.

Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review:

Kamal Jann by the Lebanese born author Dominique Eddé is a tale of familial and political intrigue, a murky stew of byzantine alliances, betrayals, and hostilities. It is a well-told story of revenge and, what’s more, a serious novel that contemplates what it means to accept your past.

It is 2010. Kamal Jann, a successful, middle-aged lawyer and human rights activist, lives in New York City. He is tormented by the horrors that he suffered at the hands of his uncle, Sayf, the powerful head of Syria’s intelligence services. Sayf began sexually molesting Kamal when the boy was twelve years old, and three years later, Sayf ordered the murders of Kamal’s mother and father (the latter of whom was Sayf’s only sibling). Kamal’s hatred for his uncle is compounded by the fact that he later allows Sayf to sponsor his college and law school education in the United States. Murad, Kamal’s brother, remains in Syria and becomes radicalized, eventually agreeing to become a martyr in a suicide bombing intended to kill the Syrian president. Kamal learns of Murad’s intentions and travels back to Syria in an attempt to save his brother and, at the same time, avenge the murders of his parents.

For the rest of the piece, go here.

It is 2010. Kamal Jann, a successful, middle-aged lawyer and human rights activist, lives in New York City. He is tormented by the horrors that he suffered at the hands of his uncle, Sayf, the powerful head of Syria’s intelligence services. Sayf began sexually molesting Kamal when the boy was twelve years old, and three years later, Sayf ordered the murders of Kamal’s mother and father (the latter of whom was Sayf’s only sibling). Kamal’s hatred for his uncle is compounded by the fact that he later allows Sayf to sponsor his college and law school education in the United States. Murad, Kamal’s brother, remains in Syria and becomes radicalized, eventually agreeing to become a martyr in a suicide bombing intended to kill the Syrian president. Kamal learns of Murad’s intentions and travels back to Syria in an attempt to save his brother and, at the same time, avenge the murders of his parents.

The fraught politics of the Middle East pervade Eddé’s novel, with the dysfunctional relationship between Lebanon and Syria taking center stage. CIA operatives and European experts machinate with Arab business, political and religious leaders, each trying to advance their respective agendas while at the same time facilitating discord and balkanization among Arabs, Palestinians, and Islamists.

The novel’s large cast of diverse, female characters are drawn with rich detail, and perhaps the most entertaining parts of the book concern two women in particular, the American Kate Man and the Lebanese Sitt Soussou. Kate is a married, Manhattan socialite who is in love with Kamal. An aesthete who makes supreme and constant efforts to surround herself with the most fashionable artists and intellectuals, Kate’s purpose consists largely to serve as a reflection for the tastes and opinions of those around her. Kate speaks with a stammer, perhaps a handicap, but more likely an affectation:

She wants to be certain, before speaking, that she has protected herself from what she does not know. Her oh, oh, more or less equals the time it takes her to check. When she speaks, time no longer counts. Her continuous bass drone enjoys an unlimited entitlement to signs, hesitation and pauses. It is like at the opera—the meaning of the words, essential as it may be, is utterly secondary. It is her tone that speaks—an anxious, panicked tone, but always demanding, superior.

Although her superficiality might appear harmless, her obsession with Kamal leads her to cunning tactics in an effort to obtain his affections and displace the woman he loves.

The ninety-year-old Sitt Soussou possesses all of the self-confidence that Kate lacks. She is regarded as a “historical monument” in both her native Beirut and in Damascus, and her counsel is valued by her son-in-law, Sayf. She and Sayf both possess a ruthless solidity when it comes to political expediency and self-preservation. Sitt Soussou doesn’t hold her tongue, and her witticisms, which really come alive under Ros Schwartz’s skillful translation, are some of the most entertaining parts of the novel:

When the deceased is someone important, people come back two or three times. Didn’t you hear all the people who said “see you tomorrow” as they left? There’s nothing better than a death for bringing together the living. You have to make an effort, go back again, insist. That’s why three visits are better than one. But unlike condolence visits which are clear and precise—everyone knows their place—visits to the sick are painful, unbearable. You inconvenience people, you inconvenience yourself, you don’t know when is the right time to visit, you don’t know when to leave. Not to mention the fact that the sick person gets used to your visits, “You do me good, come back and see me,” etc. Oh no, none of that! I like people who ask nothing of me. The dead don’t ask anything. Then it’s a pleasure to go back.

The novel’s denouement occurs during a dinner party hosted by Kamal, and this baggy, overly-long scene is one of this novel’s very few weak parts. Additionally, in a book populated by so many characters, the fortune teller La Bardolina and a few others feel like “extras,” adding little to the story.

In Kamal Jann the struggle for control is an overarching theme: Sayf, a man with seeming limitless power, cannot control his political fate; Kate is unable to make Kamal love her; and, no single country or faction is able to dictate its political solution for the Middle East. For Kamal, whose consuming rage and need to avenge Sayf’s crimes ultimately push him to the breaking point, it is only when he acknowledges that he cannot control the past that his descent into madness is arrested. Umm Assem, the Syrian woman who raised the orphaned Kamal and Murad, tells the story of the eagle that flew above its shadow, and thinking its shadow was prey, tried to capture it. She tells Kamal that the shadow cannot be possessed. And, as Kamal struggles to accept, neither can his past.

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

In the London of Hédi Kaddour’s Little Grey Lies, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan, peace has settled, but the tensions, fears, and anger of the Great War remain, even if tucked away behind stories and lies. Directly ahead, as those leftovers of the war simmer to a boil, is World War II. Little Grey Lies is a war novel without war, and about the inevitability of the next. War is a filter over the book, it is life in the inescapable aftermath of war, not the destruction, not the loss of life and property, but instead the constant memory, the subconscious, ongoing afflictions. In that space, it is the intricacies of personal connections, of secrets and the desire to out them, that become the conflicts.

Max, the character we spend the most time with, is a journalist and the book is both the narrative of his discovery of the story, and the story itself. In the first pages, he witnesses a procession of veterans, in memory of the Battle of Mons, England’s first encounter with the Germans during World War I. It is from this battle that the novel finds its birth: a myth of angels as archers protecting the defeated, yet heroic troops becomes a necessary faith for some, and even those who don’t believe are awed by the legend.

At the front of the procession is Colonel William Strether, who becomes the focus of Max’s London investigation. Strether is a respected man, utterly in control with every precise movement of his body. Working as a maître d’ he plays the room like a puppeteer: “he didn’t take their order but dictated it to a server standing behind him, commented on the menu, assembled the meal while making the client feel he was doing it himself.” Strether is a true Fascist believer, a powerful leader of men, even if “he rarely spoke in public, took no defined position, he waited for when he was alone with the leaders.” He doesn’t hesitate to use violence to lead his men, to train them toward order. It’s all part of his hiding a lie—one that is again a violence, though now against himself—and part of the inevitable path to the next war.

For the rest of the piece, go here.

Max, the character we spend the most time with, is a journalist and the book is both the narrative of his discovery of the story, and the story itself. In the first pages, he witnesses a procession of veterans, in memory of the Battle of Mons, England’s first encounter with the Germans during World War I. It is from this battle that the novel finds its birth: a myth of angels as archers protecting the defeated, yet heroic troops becomes a necessary faith for some, and even those who don’t believe are awed by the legend.

At the front of the procession is Colonel William Strether, who becomes the focus of Max’s London investigation. Strether is a respected man, utterly in control with every precise movement of his body. Working as a maître d’ he plays the room like a puppeteer: “he didn’t take their order but dictated it to a server standing behind him, commented on the menu, assembled the meal while making the client feel he was doing it himself.” Strether is a true Fascist believer, a powerful leader of men, even if “he rarely spoke in public, took no defined position, he waited for when he was alone with the leaders.” He doesn’t hesitate to use violence to lead his men, to train them toward order. It’s all part of his hiding a lie—one that is again a violence, though now against himself—and part of the inevitable path to the next war.

Max and his friend Lena also want to control their lives, Lena through her love affairs with men, Max by uncovering what has been hidden. This ever-present desire for order and control is the post-war condition. It is not just individuals composing their lives. We see the rise of fascism, recognize that the fearful need to control, birthed by war, creates the next.

Max and Lena meet with Strether as Max tries to get the Colonel to reveal his past. Overlapping this, Lena meets with her young lover, breaks up with him, and monitors his new affair. These are characters who are careful with their stories, shaping their identities, their lives. Max may claim to be a journalist seeking facts, but he wants to break a person apart, then tell that person’s next tale—all the while side-stepping his own past. They are held together by these efforts, as an English lord puts it late on in the book: “To reinvent life out of a lie.”

The unveiling of Strether to Max occurs disjointedly, as Strether is almost as intent on avoiding his past as Max is on bringing it to light. This meandering is one of the simple ways that Kaddour creates deep characters in this short novel. By moving around, purposely glimpsing at moments, each glimpse can be direct and revealing in an instant. Movements and character commentary shoot out of their own lies into poignantly relatable truths, which, when the novel’s greatest lie is revealed, become more intricate.

Even though Kaddour creates a character complex enough to fight with herself while having insights into others, the weakest part of the novel is the time spent with Lena. In her interactions with Max and Strether she is interesting; her perspective into them is sharp. Without her these conversations wouldn’t be as full, and her presence, her relationship with Strether, should be returned to when Stether’s past is understood. But the early-on section of her love affair peters out, and by the end of the novel is forgotten, feeling like filler.

Against that, though, is the way this skill of insight lets us open up to a character introduced midway through the novel, without explanation. The immediate supposition, given that we are read Glady’s story just after being introduced to Strether’s wife, is soon shattered. From there, we follow Glady because we know some truths must sit at the end of this tale, and because Kaddour is able to make us care enough along the way, to make Glady a complex character with motivations combatting against themselves.

For this review, the full complexities of Little Grey Lies must be passed over. The most interesting life it has to offer would be so much less so if a reader knows the answers going into the tale. As it goes, there is enough to make it an entertaining read, but without its final twist — and thankfully, it does not twist and then immediately end, but follows the path to explore a little further—Kaddour’s effort wouldn’t offer much more than the familiar. With a lie at its core, however, we are given a new way to look at how people find ways to make it through life.

Tiffany also reviews literature in translation for the San Francisco and Sacramento Book Reviews and runs the mouthwatering food porn and book-geeking Tumblr blog . Here’s the beginning of her review:

Every fictional work set in L.A. begins with a slow crawl through its streets in the early hours of the morning right after sunrise. Maybe it’s always done this way to emphasize the vast sprawl of the city and highlight the loneliness of its inhabitants, or maybe it’s intended to emphasize that L.A., like New York, is only quiet from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Starlite Terrace is no different. So sit back, relax, and cruise around the streets of Sherman Oaks and Hollywood with no purpose or direction.

Starlite Terrace provides no new insights about L.A. or literary fiction, but its redeeming quality is that it seems to be a poetic extension of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, featuring analogous characters in their twilight years who were in their prime in the 50s and 60s instead of the 70s and 80s. These characters are as alone and lost as the ones of Less Than Zero, but more attached to reality—probably due to old age.

The work consists of four short stories related by loneliness and despair featuring a cast of residents living in the same apartment complex under the same name as the work. This collection of stories explores the lives of four respective residents through observations and interactions with other neighbors in the apartment complex. Like any apartment complex, the phenomena where neighbors who know the most about you are the ones you speak to the least holds true in Starlite Terrace. The first and last stories in the collection, which focus on loneliness and ill-formed memories based on illusion, frame the inner two stories concerning despair and taking desperate measures to find and attempt to win back lost loved ones.

For the rest of the review, go here.

Starlite Terrace provides no new insights about L.A. or literary fiction, but its redeeming quality is that it seems to be a poetic extension of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, featuring analogous characters in their twilight years who were in their prime in the 50s and 60s instead of the 70s and 80s. These characters are as alone and lost as the ones of Less Than Zero, but more attached to reality—probably due to old age.

The work consists of four short stories related by loneliness and despair featuring a cast of residents living in the same apartment complex under the same name as the work. This collection of stories explores the lives of four respective residents through observations and interactions with other neighbors in the apartment complex. Like any apartment complex, the phenomena where neighbors who know the most about you are the ones you speak to the least holds true in Starlite Terrace. The first and last stories in the collection, which focus on loneliness and ill-formed memories based on illusion, frame the inner two stories concerning despair and taking desperate measures to find and attempt to win back lost loved ones.

“The Man at Noah’s Window” concerns Rex, a regular at Noah’s Deli near the apartment complex, who is trying to find substance in his life based on a myth that his father’s hands were used as a stand-in for Gary Cooper’s in High Noon. However, when Rex passes away and the narrator views the film searching for a hand double, he finds no evidence that one was ever used.

“Solar Eclipse” focuses on a father, Moss, who contemplates hiring a hit on his runaway wife, only to be preempted when the hit man is killed at the planned rendezvous point the day before they were to exchange funds.

“Rider on the Storm,” the most disturbing, focuses on Gary, who attempts to track down his lost love after obtaining a gun, only to throw himself into a fire at an L.A. party.

“The Woman in the Sea of Stars” provides murky closure to the collection. June, a collector of wedding gowns who never remarried, randomly reconnects with a relative of her estranged grandfather the day before her 70th birthday. June calls an impromptu celebration that quickly turns macabre when she throws the ashes of her estranged grandfather into the swimming pool of the apartment complex then dives into the water beneath the ashes.

The atmosphere of the novel does have that German Expressionist, early Hollywood noir feel. It is enhanced by Roth’s fleeting references to the German art community that migrated to Hollywood to develop early noir cinema in the 20s and 30s. He also relies heavily on noir film elements such as flashbacks, an unidentified narrator, and characters who are living undesired lives and fulfilling predetermined destinies to progress through the chain of stories.

However, the references to old Hollywood may start to wear on the reader. Therefore, when navigating through this work, brush up on your Hollywood history as it is heavily relied upon and used almost like an additional character in the work. These references are almost to the point of nostalgic reminiscing, leading one to believe that the author has a minor obsession or past with old Hollywood. The references are so plentiful that they might come off as a crutch or some form of intellectual pretension to readers who are not attuned to this time period in L.A:

They say Marilyn¹ gazed longingly out her third-floor window every night, that orphanage window on ElCentro, looking across at the illuminated ball. The RJO ball, I mean, the globe over by the corner of Gower and Melrose. It’s still there. In those days, the RKO ball was always lit up at light. Little Marilyn hitched her dream to that ball as she looked out her window, into the light—her dream of being a movie star. Like Jean Harlow.

. . .

I remembered that cemetery on whose sloes D.W. Griffith had shot the Civil War scenes in his silent Birth of a Nation, and realized that, from there, you could see clear across to Burbank. And in the mid-fifties, down below along Pass Avenue, just a stone’s throw from where today the Ventura Freeway cuts through, was the Columbia Rand, with Hadleyville, the town in High Noon, in which Rex’s father was supposed to have served as Cooper’s hand double.

Despite the reliance on esoteric references to the Hollywood of yore and the slow crawling prose (imagine coastal fog slowly rolling over the Hollywood Hills from Santa Monica), the reader will be drawn in either for the all-American allure of all things Hollywood and L.A., despite being a novice of the subject, or by Roth’s ability to slowly and deliberately build a monotonously complex community in such a brief collection of short stories. The reader’s payoff in completing the book is the appreciation for their own relationships, preventing them from being removed and isolated from society like the characters in Starlite Terrace.

¹ This is Marilyn as in Marilyn Monroe.

This book was another one several of our reviewers jumped at, and yet another strong and insanely fascinating sounding piece of German literature, and German literature in translation. That, and Inka Parei has a pretty rad sounding name, and some intriguing titles to boot (, to name another).

Here’s some of Patrick’s review:

Of all the Holocaust novel genres, the most interesting is often the one that doesn’t describe clearly defined horrors, written with a clarity that brings the events into the present, whether written in present tense or not, but the one grasping at memories, personal or cultural, and even more so the ones of shadow memories, of the gaps that narrators have passed over or lost—_Sebald’s Austerlitz_ one of the definers of this sub-genre. Inka Parei’s What Darkness Was takes this forward, acknowledging that history has been made in Germany since the Holocaust, and that it too can be poorly understood and put into a larger continuum of culture, and lost or denied culture. Set in late 1977 in West Germany and within the addled, lost consciousness of an old man, What Darkness Was isn’t a novel of direct connections, of completeness, of action and reaction, or of explanations for the reader, but instead of gestures toward, of using abstraction, atmosphere to set the reader up to find how it comes together, and what it has to offer from the past and for the future. Its title, embedded in a passage midway through this slim novel, stands as an example, or even a definition of this . . .

At the opening, our old man protagonist is in complete darkness, even literally, but also in his place in life. His house is not his home: it is not one he built, bought, or aged in, but inherited, without being able to remember from whom. Disconnected from his present, “part of him was still living in Berlin;” yet not able to recall enough of his past to bring that to life either. As Parei builds the setting, there is slight humor in an old newspaper with a picture of Elvis that is not, though contemporary for the novel, a cultural calling from the past, refusing idealization by being not the hip-swinging Elvis, but the aged, fat, soon-to-die-on-a-toilet Elvis. Though humor is not a running current, a keenness of detail is, and Katy Derbyshire’s translation preserves the wonderful way that states of being and atmosphere intermingle and become the same . . .

For the rest of the review, go here.