February 2008
Time Out
Beethoven Was
One-Sixteenth Black
by Nadine Gordimer;
Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007
South African writer Nadine Gordimer spent most of her career exploring racial tensions. Now in the 1991 Nobel Prize winner’s tenth book, Gordimer has compiled thirteen short stories examining subjects domestic and quotidian, while also addressing the ironies of post-apartheid South Africa. The title story, for example, describes a white university professor who, in order to be part of the new ruling class, desperately searches for any trace of blackness in his family line. From rather experimental short-shorts to longer stories of more conventional artifice, Gordimer’s anthology gives a glimpse into the mind of one of Africa’s great modern literary geniuses.
Modern Life
by Matthea Harvey;
Greywolf Press, 2007
“I sit in the second-floor window and watch leashes between dogs and people.” From such small observations to thought-provoking prose poems about robots and humans, Matthea Harvey illuminates the many facets of reality—both what we see and what we think we know. Whimsy is never far from morbidity or catastrophe. Furnished with some absurdist twists, each of her poems movingly reflects the world we inhabit today without refraining from the uncomfortable thought of a looming tomorrow. Far from fanciful escapist romps, Harvey’s fables are pointed cautionary tales that tell the reader more about the world than entire volumes of prose.
Flet
by Joyelle McSweeney; Fence Magazine Inc., Division of Fence Books, 2007
Touted on its back cover as “speculative fiction,”
Flet is set in a spaced-out, delimited future land called “Nation,” where late-stage capitalism and an unchecked faith in technology have wreaked planetary havoc. An “Emergency” leads to the evacuation of cities and limitations on personal liberties. Young heroine Flet begins to suspect that the invoked “Emergency” is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation. The novel, both coded and elegiac, is a warning cry and an evocation of nostalgia for eras within recent memory, when we and our planet were healthier. Yet, the book—loosely alternating straight narrative with stream of consciousness—also pays tribute to the urge to hold onto the ephemeral pleasures of language while so many other joys fizzle and fade. <<<
