Analfabeto / An Alphabet

Analfabeto / An AlphabetEllen BaxtShearsman, 2007Dictionary lists intersperse the fragmentary text of Analfabeto / An Alphabet, but they are always incomplete. We have the English, but we don’t have all the Portuguese. So, for the letter J, we learn that “judia” means “jewess,” and “judiaria” means “ghetto,” but we do not know how to say “It was a good play,” or “boa constrictor (feminine).” The untranslated English pops up here and there throughout the text (along with some of the Portuguese we’ve learned and can now, partially, apply). Later, when presented with a landscape: “tarp / thatch / bags // jagged bottle halves against the pigeons,” we’ll only know what to call it (“judiaria”) if we’ve been paying close attention. That is, if a ghetto in Brazil is also a ghetto here.Ellen Baxt’s Analfabeto is one of those books that teach the reader how to read them, and so it correlates with Baxt’s own life in Brazil, where she had to learn to read more than just the language (“the buildings have two addresses, one above the other so you are always at the wrong building”). Eventually, the idea of translation becomes the glass through which we read the text and everything seems related to it: handwriting, culture, religion, gestures:

Both handssnappingmeans very.Come bythe housemeans we’llsee eachother again,but is notan invitationto come bythe house.

Along with the dictionary entries, lists, and fragments, Baxt gives us what look like short entries in a journal or traveler’s notebook. In this, a short, sharp book, Baxt creates poetic language out of mistranslation (“Sit next to me, blacklist flatterer. Slow my lion”) and poetic encounters out of the enchanting and frustrating confusion of a foreign place:

She spreads her blanket over my geography, pushes the latch. At dawn she asks if my family knows. In the van she covered our legs and held my hand underneath. Você tem vontade? But I don’t know vontade.

Life, in fact, moves too swiftly for even the best translations, and it is the moments in which Baxt captures that alluring and maddening mix that are the reason to pick up a copy of Analfabeto:

The wind is picking up. A plane lands over the water as the ferry departs. Christine is at her desk in the Palisades plotting Grimano, Italy. The kids stand up and pump their swings. Intermittently, a bell rings. Across the water they’re trying to get read of the winter clothes. The mannequins’ shirts say “Liquidçāo” across their torpedoed breasts.

___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE

The New Oxford World History: The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCEIan TattersallOxford, 2008Focusing on early humans to the exclusion of non-human biology or world geology, this lean book may have been more accurately titled The History of Humans on Earth to the End of the Stone Age, Minus Continental Drift, Half a Billion Years of Crowded Life, and Everything Prior to Us. But this is an objection to the title only; what this new book covers, it covers well.The New Oxford World Histories are an ambitious and timely project. If The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE is a representative sample, the series will be sharp, engaging, and concise. Probably useless to specialists, this is an excellent book for the general intelligent reader: a tight, fast-moving work of equal parts science, history, and the history of science.Following brief primers on the work of archeologists, evolutionary biologists, and paleo-anthropologists, Ian Tattersall expertly walks the reader through what differentiates early humans (all twelve or so species) from their close ancestors. We get loads of comparative skeletal analysis (clearly a love of Tattersall’s) and a convincing explanation of how we hominids spread into the world and what made our rapid migration possible (not our special brains, it turns out, but our special hip joints).Without resorting to conjecture, Tattersall describes the lives of Neanderthals, Eargasters, and their kin, sorting through their complex and incomplete ancestral trees. And if he doesn’t practice the kind of storytelling that would have made these dry bones come alive, readers at least get plenty of interesting nuggets to show off with, like “the pattern of fractured and healed bones in Neanderthal skeletons resembles that among rodeo riders today” due to their “frequent close encounters with unfriendly animals.” These same Neanderthals, he tells us, tamed fire and built shelters. They protected the weaker members of their group; they buried their dead.Then we arrived.Although Tattersall mourns the loss of the art-making hunter-gatherer culture and the ecological damage wrought by crop cultivation, he acknowledges that Homo Sapiens were doing plenty of damage before we set down to farming: killing off not only most of the big animals but the rest of the early humans. For a time, he gingerly steps around the subject of what exactly happened to all of these hominid cousins of ours, before admitting:

Although (or perhaps because) it is the Cro-Magnons’ creativity that we find most impressive about them, these people, like us, certainly also had a dark side. And it may well have been expressed in the Neanderthals’ disappearance.

Why Tattersall should be so delicate about the subject, I have no idea. But the rest of the story proceeds with confidence.This promises to be an exciting new series from Oxford. Let the great work begin.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.

The Waitress Was New

The Waitress Was NewBy Dominique Fabre, translated by Jordan StumpArchipelago Books, 2008Pierre, a bartender, is a gentle man—tactful, considerate. He may not always have been so, but life has worn him smooth. Even in the privacy of his own mind, he maintains a respectful distance from the world. He’s canny enough to know what comes of engagement. Of a new waitress at work, he writes, “I don’t look too closely at her shoes, the way I usually do to size someone up, because I had a feeling she’d seen some rough times and there was no point in overdoing it.”This, the narrative voice of Dominique Fabre’s new novel, creates an atmosphere which is comfortable but not quite intimate. And the reader, in turn, is left wondering whether intimacy with Pierre is even possible. The extent to which he’s addressing himself alone or a random patron at his bar is somewhat in question, but we’re can’t tell weather his tone would change either way. Small details are noted in the same resigned voice of mild interest, as are life-changing events.In The Waitress Was New, we watch Pierre’s professional life disintegrate over the course of one long weekend in Asniéres-sur-Seine. The novel is an exercise in perspective, where modest quiet moments of reflection can become huge and moving simply because of how infrequently they occur, as below, when Pierre looks up:

The sky was brighter here, because of the height of the building. Sometimes the sky must even have been a little too bright. It made me think of before, long before, when I wasn’t a barman but a fireman, an explorer, a soldier, and a soccer player, a long way from Le Cercle, the bright sky I had inside me, and above me, before the apartment blocks where I grew up.

And then we’re back to the shifting pattern of the street crowd, the variations in the weather.Dominique Fabre has written ten novels in French and thanks to Jordan Stump, we finally have the chance to read one of his poised, quietly dark stories translated into English. The Waitress Was New is a fine short novel and entirely deserving of the American audience that Archipelago Books has delivered it to.___John Cotter‘s novel Under the Small Lights was published by Miami University Press in 2010 and his short fiction is forthcoming from Redivider and New Genre. He’s a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly and lives in Denver, Colorado.