Monday, February 10, 2025

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

Review: Tanner's Twelve Swingers, by Lawrence Block

by Rich Horton

Lawrence Block was born in 1938, and began publishing in the late '50s. He's written some SF, some romance, a fair amount of erotica, and other things, but he's been primarily a crime writer. He's probably best known for his Bernie Rhodenbarr and his Matthew Scudder series, as well as four novels about Chip Harrison, the first two comic soft porn, the other two crime novels. But his first series character to gain traction was Evan Tanner. Tanner appeared in seven novels between 1966 and 1970, with an eighth coming out in 1996. These novels are not crime novels, but lightly comic spy thrillers. (Based on the one book I have, they were packaged as titillatingly as possible, despite content that never really reaches event he softest porn (though there are mild sex scenes.))

I say "lightly comic", but I don't think that gets the tone quite right, based at least on Tanner's Twelve Swingers, which was the third in the series, coming out in 1967. There are definite comic bits, mind you, and in some ways it's kind of a sendup -- the action is implausible, and we're not supposed to believe in it, and the CIA, as well as political and other authorities in any number of countries, some in for plenty of mockery, but it's not really a funny novel. The character interactions feel real (if idealized, especially as to the way beautifully and good women keep wanting to sleep with Tanner), and the political commentary is often quite pointed. (Tanner is cynical about the US, the Soviet Union, China, and dictators everywhere -- his ideal is, really, a world of many more independent polities. It's striking to see him advocating strongly for the dissolution of the Yugoslavia into at least five different nations -- which of course happened (not without a terrible war) about a quarter century later.)

Evan Tanner fought in the Korean War, and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head, and destroyed his sleep center. He has a disability pension, and has used his extra 8 hours of wakefulness to learn a lot of stuff -- different languages, lots of science and other knowledge, memberships in all sorts of organizations from various revolutionary groups to the Flat Earth Society.) He writes term papers and even Ph. D. theses to make extra money. And, he does a bit of work on the side for a government organization without a name, which seems to allow him lots of latitude in his assignments.

In this book he has promised a Latvian friend to rescue is lost love from the USSR. (Yes, another thing Tanner advocates is the breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent states. (Also, he's intrigued by the idea of 50 independent American states,)) Alas, he thinks the job is impossible. But when the organization he works for wants him to go to Colombia for what he thinks is a bad reason, he uses his mission to Latvia as an excuse to decline. He begins in Macedonia though, where it turns out he has a young son (presumably conceived in a previous book?) So he sees his son, and on the way out of Yugoslavia finds himself further burdened with a Montenegrin who has written a book calling for the splitting of Yugoslavia. The two proceed through Hungary and Poland to Lithuania and Latvia -- and somehow by the end he's picked up a 7 year old girl who is the rightful Queen of Lithuania, 12 extremely beautiful Latvian gymnasts (a package deal including his friend's lover) and eventually even a jazz-playing Russian pilot. All this of course further complicates his mission.

Does he succeed? Well, there are sequels to come! The means he uses to cross borders and foil the police and so on are, as the book goes on, increasingly absurd. He sleeps with a few women -- most of whom would be happy if he's settle down with him, though in the end he has the one son, the prospects of perhaps another child but how knows?, and an adopted daughter. We don't have to believe in much of this -- but it's entertaining throughout, a truly professional but affecting performance.


Thursday, February 6, 2025

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

Review: Endangered Species, by Gene Wolfe

by Rich Horton

Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was without question one of the greatest SF writers of all time. And he was notably excellent at pretty much any length -- he wrote great short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, novel series -- and even an extended series of series of novels. And he kept writing short fiction even after he had great success with his novels. By my count he ended up with eight "primary" story collections, and about as many that variously shuffled the stories, or included only a few shorter pieces, or were otherwise offbeat. The consensus view might be that his first collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), is his best -- and I probably would agree, but all the collections are worthwhile. I had occasion to reread his 1989 collection Endangered Species, I was delighted throughout.

The collection, not surprisingly, focuses on stories published in the '80s, but extends back to stories from very early in Wolfe's career, in the late '60s, and has some '70s pieces as well. Wolfe was a master at the novella length, but only one of these stories is a novella -- "Silhouette", which closes the book. There are several novelettes, but this book is really dominated by short stories. In a way, this was a revelation -- I've so long adored Wolfe's novellas and long novelettes that this made me realize that his best short stories are quite as brilliant.

Speaking generally, all the stories here show off the elegance of Wolfe's prose. Most of them are mysterious in some way or another -- the very property captured by the adjective "Wolfean". They display Kipling's influence in the way Wolfe tells you just enough to make the story comprehensible -- but no more. They are sometimes impish, sometimes romantic, sometimes just plain cool. A surprising number of the stories can be called horror -- this is a very important part of Wolfe's repertoire, but I don't know that it's emphasized much.

The longest story here is the novella "Silhouette", a dark story about a starship reaching a potentially colonizable planet, and the internal battle over what to do. Other longish stories include "The Rose and the Nightingale (and What Came of It)", an Arabic-flavored story about a beggar boy who agrees to help a storyteller retrieve a treasure from inside a Pasha's garden -- it's nicely told, with the expected twists, and a romantic flavor, but it's more conventional than I expect from Wolfe. "The Other Dead Man" is one of his better, and creepier, stories, in which a spaceship is severely damaged and the Captain is fatally injured, but the medical bay is programmed to resuscitate him at all costs. This moves slickly to the inevitable horrific conclusion. "The Detective of Dreams" is about a Frenchman hired to investigate who might be sending some people in a German city terrifying dreams -- the reader might recognize the content of the dreams the victims describe, from which the detective can deduce the surprising identity of the haunter.

Most of the stories are rather shorter. There a few instance of linked stories. "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus" and "The Woman the Unicorn Loved" are about a professor who is part of a group devoted to protecting genetically engineered creatures who have been abandoned by their makers (in this future DNA alterations can be done with a home kit.) Many of these creatures are based on myth, and in these two stories the professor befriends women who form, let's say, closer relationships to the title creatures -- increasing the need to save them from the usual fate discarded beings receive. There is a set of four linked stories that were published in one of Roger Elwood's more interesting projects, Continuum, a set of four anthologies each containing installments of a longer project that continued through the books. Wolfe's stories are "The Dark of the June", "The Death of Hyle", "From the Notebooks of Dr. Stein", and "Thag". They tell of a future in which people can choose to be uploaded into a virtual existence, and the first one is about a man whose wife has died and whose daughter is contemplated upload. As the stories continue, things get stranger, with what seems like time travel, and a malevolent creature called Thag. Interesting work. 

Three stories are related to Wolfe's Solar Cycle. "The Map" and "The Cat" are set in Severian's time. "The Map" is one of the best stories in the book, as a man hires a boat to travel down the river Gyoll to a deserted part of the city, near the Old Citadel familiar from The Book of the New Sun. The boat's captain Eata (one of Severian's fellow apprentices, though by this time Severian is the Autarch) lets the man out but waits to pick him up -- and when he does we learn a little lesson about the map the man carries, and an ironic bit more about what Eata knows of maps. "The Cat" is a story told during Severian's reign about events decades prior, about an exultant girl and the strange cat she had, and what happened to her when she got in trouble with an older man. The other Solar Cycle story is "The God and His Man", a short fable apparently from the Brown Book that Severian encounters. In this story, the God of a certain world summons a Man whom he sets a task -- to live among the different people on his world and learn how they differ from each other and in what ways they are cruel. What the Man learns, in the end, may not be precisely to the God's benefit.

Of the other short stories, I'll mention a few particular favorites. "The Cabin on the Coast" opens the book, and it's a lovely dark story of a man and a woman in love -- but the man is the son of a prominent politician, who is not happy that his son wants to marry this woman. Then the woman disappears -- and the man is convinced a mysterious boat he sees off the coast has something to do with it. Can he go there and get her back? The ending is perhaps what readers expect -- but still very nicely turned. "Our Neighbour by David Copperhead" purports to be a story told by the title character during his period as a journalist, in which he observes a man lurking about his neighbour's house, and learns the man's story -- he's investigating what the neighbour does in the house, at the request of a woman who feels that her daughter may have been somehow mistreated there. And the man ends up learning about the neighnour, who is a scientist involved with phrenology and mesmerism -- and whose investigations lead him to a mordant moral discovery. "The War Beneath the Tree" is a long-time favorite of mine, about a group of a young boy's toys who come to "life" on Christmas Eve. And they stage a battle -- for a reason, which the boy learns. And in that reason is buried a delightful stinger. "The HORARS of War" is an affecting story of a journalist "embedded" in a group of robot soldiers fighting a Vietnam like war against an unnamed Enemy. The journalist must impersonate the robot soldiers, which means sharing their battles -- and perhaps their fate? The story twists a little on its way to a moving conclusion. "Suzanne Delage" is another longtime favorite -- a simple story in a sense, in which the narrator tells of the title woman, with whom he went to high school but never really knew, and had lost track with. Until a commonplace but odd encounter brings her to mind. 

I could go on. Not all of the stories are masterworks -- a few are clever but trivial, and a couple don't quite work. But there is always something intriguing there. And, really -- instead of the stories I discuss above perhaps I should have mentioned "Lukora", or "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story", or "Kevin Malone", or "In the House of Gingerbread", or "All the Hues of Hell". And each reader will have their own favorites anyway -- so just read them!

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

Review: Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman

by Rich Horton

Sometimes I have plans in advance to read a certain book, and sometimes it's all but random. Looking for my next audiobook last week I thought, hey, someone recommended Rhoda Lerman to me a while ago, maybe I'll see about her? A search on Audiobook turned up nothing by Rhoda Lerman. But they did have Radiomen, by Eleanor Lerman. And I remembered that it had won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel several years ago, somewhat surprisingly. The year was 2016, actually, and other finalists included work by the likes of Nnedi Okorafor, Kim Stanley Robinson, Linda Nagata, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Neal Stephenson. I was in the audience for the presentation, and the presenter more or less begged the us to give this unexpected jewal a try. (Or so I remember things.) And I did put the novel on my "try sometime" list, but that was all -- so seeing it show up last week was enough for me to go ahead and read it (or listen to it.) 

Eleanor Lerman was born in New York in 1952, and was raised in the Bronx and in Far Rockaway -- which turns out to be imporant to this novel! (And in a strange coincidence I just discovered, the writer whose work I was looking for, Rhoda Lerman, was born in Far Rockaway! Lerman was Rhoda's married name, and I don't think Rhoda and Eleanor were related at all. Rhoda Lerman was born in 1936 and died in 2015, and her most SFnal novel is called The Book of the Night.) Eleanor Lerman published a book of poetry, Armed Love, in 1973 that got a lot of attention -- good and bad -- and a National Book Award nomination. (A poet and novelist I recently wrote about for Black Gate, X. J. Kennedy, reviewed Armed Love harshly in the New York Times, giving it an XX rating because he found the subject matter (drug use, Lesbianism, etc.) offensive.) The attention turned Lerman away from writing for a quarter century, but since the turn of the millennium she has published regularly, both poetry and fiction. One other novel, The Stargazer's Embassy (2017) was a Campbell finalist.

Laurie Perzin is a woman in her 40s, in 2002, very shortly after 9/11. She's working night shifts as a bartender in the JFK Airport. One night she calls in to a late night radio show while a psychic, Ravenette, is the guest, and to her shock the psychic narrates an incident from Laurie's childhood, when she was with her Uncle Avi, and saw a mysterious sort of shadow man. Laurie ends up need to figure out how this could have happened, and she gets in touch with the radio host, a man named Jack Shepherd, who is both a skeptic about woo-woo stuff, and fascinated by it. He gets her in touch with Ravenette, who turns out to be a member of a cult called Blue Awareness, which is transparently based on Scientology. 

It turns out that without quite realizing it Laurie has been somewhat entangle with Blue Awareness her whole life. As a child, Avi took care of her fairly often. Avi was into ham radio, and to other radio based activities such as listening the signals from satellites. The childhood incident the psychic had sensed was when Laurie and Avi were at an apartment building on the Rockaway peninsula, where he did some maintenance, and also listening to signals from Sputnik 10. Not long after, Laurie's mother died, and Laurie fell out of touch with Avi, who died fairly young. Laurie had wild teenage years. But she had encountered Blue Awareness, partly because while in the Navy during WWII Avi had worked with the founder of Blue Awareness, and had heard his story of an encounter somewhat similar to Laurie's. The founder begins by publishing pulp SF, then starts his cult, which by the time of the novel is run by his son, Raymond Gilmartin. And Raymond, along with Ravenette, are very interested in both the radio Avi used and another device Avi made which is similar to the "blue boxes" Blue Awareness uses in treating its members.

The plot follows Laurie as she tries to stay away from any involvement, but is forced to deal with Blue Awareness and the Radiomen in various ways: a burglary in which Avi's equipment is taken from Laurie's house, a "Dogon dog" Laurie is given thank to her Malian neighbor, a kidnap attempt on Laurie, foiled by her new dog, Jack Shepherd's increasing interest, and finally another encounter with what she realizes must be her Radioman. The novel is rather discursive -- in some ways it's a New York (or perhaps Queens) novel, going into plenty of detail about Laurie's everyday life and her wanderings between her apartment, her job at the airport, Jack's office, and Rockaway. It takes its time getting to the climax, but doesn't bore us along the way, and the ending is, almost surprisingly, quite powerful, quite moving. It is definitely a science fiction novel -- it doesn't cheat or play literary games with its content -- but it may not be the sort of SF that appeals to lots of SF readers. (An SF story on the same subject would have been half the length or less, and would have had a more transcendent and yet less moving ending.) I really enjoyed the novel, and it strikes me as a novel that it's good to see an award committee bring to wider attention.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Resurrected Review: Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum

Resurrected Review: Horizons, by Mary Rosenblum

by Rich Horton

Mary Rosenblum (1952-2018) was a fine writer of both SF and mysteries. I greatly enjoyed her short fiction, and I reprinted her story "Search Engine" in my first Best of the Year volume. Alas, she died far too soon in an airplane crash. (She was a pilot.)

I wrote this review back in 2007 when this novel, which turned out to be her last SF novel, appeared. I'm resurrecting it now.

Mary Rosenblum's Horizons is a near future SF novel with a somewhat old-fashioned shape and set of concerns. And I liked it for that -- it's very exciting, fast-moving, with some nice speculative elements. And with an engaging heroine. And really nasty bad guys. (Who espouse a philosophy I personally find repellent -- but which many might have at least some sympathy for.)

The heroine is Ahni Huang, daughter of the head of an influential Taiwanese commercial family. The opening sequence was originally a story in Asimov's ("Green Shift"), and in it she goes up to the North American Alliance's orbital platform, NYUp, to avenge her brother Xai's murder. But there she learns that Xai is actually alive, and acting against her family. She also discovers a secret on NYUp: a group of apparently illegally modified humans are living in microgravity, under the leadership of Dane Nilsson, the still "normal" chief "gardener" for the orbital.

After a confrontation with her father and mother, who are acting at mysterious cross-purposes, she returns to NYUp. The platform is under increasing tension. There is an independence movement, lead by Dane, but it is spiralling out of control, moving too rapidly, apparently as a result of external agitators. Possibly these are controlled by Xai, who may be working with Li Zhen, son of the Chinese leader, and the man in charge of the Chinese orbital platform.

All this moves very rapidly to a confrontation -- the World Council military is pushed to act against the people of NYUp, particularly Dane. So Ahni must figure out who is really behind all these problems, and how or if she can get sufficient cooperation between Dane's allies on NYUp, between an asteroid-based pilot/smuggler, and between Li Zhen to prevent a true disaster from destroying everybody's hopes for the future.

I quite enjoyed the novel. At the same time it shows some of the weaknesses of the genre ... some due to commercial considerations, and some more specifically SFnal. The commercial weaknesses lie in such aspects as the convenient brilliance of the heroine and hero and their associated, and in their routinely exalted social positions. Also, the resolution of the plot is quite convenient -- it is exactly what we as readers want, but it comes too rapidly, too easily, but also after (I felt) somewhat implausible raising of the stakes, increasing of the danger to the characters we care about. By which I mean that I think the end state could have been plausibly arrived at, but somewhat more slowly, and without the life-or-death confrontation towards the end, complete with dramatic courtroom intervention. But that would have been hard to make work novelistically. In the end it is lots of fun, good solid SF -- not a lasting masterpiece but nice work.

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Review: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford

Review: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford

a review by Rich Horton

Francis Spufford is a much-admired UK writer who began writing nonfiction, then wrote a sort of amalgam of nonfiction and SF called Red Plenty (2010), and since has published three novels: Golden Hill (2016), Light Perpetual (2021), and Cahokia Jazz (2023). (It would appear that he considers the proper number of words for a title to be exactly two!) I bought Golden Hill when it came out, but still have not got to it. (Though I will soon!) And I saw enough about Cahokia Jazz that I knew I had to read it, and so I have.

Cahokia Jazz is an alternate history murder mystery doomed love story political thriller. And all of those elements work. It is urgently readable, speculatively involving, full of action, with a profound moral center, and tremendously moving. It is also very well-written. It is my second favorite SF novel from 2023, after the very different Booker Prize winner Orbital. As Cahokia Jazz was not published in the US until 2024, it is eligible for the 2025 Hugos, and it will definitely be on my nomination ballot.

The novel is set in Cahokia, the capitol of the state of the same name, in the US in the 1920s. Cahokia is located roughly where the present day city of that name is located -- just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, though St. Louis is a small village in this alternate history. It seems that the Mississippian Culture of Native Americans (the Mound Builders or their immediate descendants) survived in Cahokia in until the coming of French missionaries around 1700, at which time they converted to a syncretic Catholicism. (In our history the Cahokian civilization had mostly dispersed by the end of the 14th century, and the remaining natives in that area were decimated by smallpox. The afterword to this novel posits a less severe strain of smallpox arriving first and conferring some resistance while causing far fewer deaths.) The natives, here called takouma, remain the political leaders of Cahokia, though they became a state during the Civil War. The city itself has a very roughly equal population of takouma, takata (whites), and taklousa (blacks). Joe Barrow, the main character, is mixed race, part takouma, part taklousa, and grew up in an orphanage in Iowa. He came to Cahokia with Phineas Drummond, whom he met in a military hospital while both were serving in the Great War. Now they are partners, detectives on the Cahokia police force. And their latest case is horrifying -- a man has been murdered on the roof of a major city building, in a way that resembles Aztec sacrifices, complete with the heart cut out of his chest.

It's quickly clear that the murder has political implications. The first suspects are a small radical group of takouma, who believe that they are descended from the Aztecs. And Joe and Phin begin to follow up on this notion. But Joe is summoned to meetings with the two major political leaders of Cahokia: Cuauhtemoc Hashi, the Man of the Sun, and Couma Hashi, his niece, the Moon. The Man of the Sun (called simply The Man throughout) is the true hereditary leader of the state of Cahokia, though the politics of statehood complicate his position. Hereditary succession is to nephews (or nieces if necessary) instead of to children, so Couma's brother is nominally the heir, but he has run off to Hollywood to be a movie star, and thus Couma acts as the Moon. This too is complicated, because women in Cahokian society have a specific role, different to that of men though quite as powerful. The Man is an admirable if devious person, and Couma is a very beautiful woman -- though also devious, and Joe is soon under her spell, though any sort of relationship is clearly impossible. The Man urges Joe to seriously investigate the case, and not to accede to a politically convenient solution.

So the story follows the investigation, which leads the Joe and Phin in unexpected directions. It's quickly clear that the murder was more of a false flag operation, but proving this and finding the real culprit will be tricky. Many of the whites in the city (including the murder victim) are under the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which hates natives (and Catholics) as much as it hates blacks. And there are some takouma who are intrigued by the Aztec myth. There are powerful political figures involved, many of whom clearly would like to wrest power from the takouma. Throughout the course of the investigation we get to see a wide spectrum of city residents -- rich takata and poor, rich and poor takouma, and mostly poorer taklousa, including the jazz musicians with whom Joe -- a brilliant pianist -- likes to associate. We see the politics of the police department. There are some magical scenes with Joe playing piano in a couple of bars -- Spufford's writing about the music is exceptional. We meet laborers in a meat packing plant, and the middle class family of a takouma woman who works with Joe in the department, and takouma farmers out in the country, and the upper crust at parties -- at one of which Joe meets a certain anthropologist named Kroeber. (This book is set before Kroeber married Ursula's mother, and Spufford dedicates the book "In respectful memory of Professor Kroeber's daughter".) We get a fascinating look at the culture and society of Cahokia -- a plausible alternative to our own, though reasonably well integrated with the US society of that era, and presented as different -- neither especially better nor worse.

The story takes place over about a week, and the murder mystery -- though it is eventually and wrenchingly solved -- is less important than the political story. The fate of Cahokia truly hangs in the balance. Joe's fate, and that of his partner, and of the Sun and Moon, are intertwined with all this, of course. The events depicted are exciting, with some terrific action scenes, and some tragedy, some betrayals, some realpolitik. There is a host of characters, most sharply even if briefly portrayed -- besides the major ones I've mentioned there are newspaper reporters -- Mickey Casqui and Miss Anderson; and policemen: Doyle and Hanunu, plus Miss Chokfi, the capable and surprisingly deep office administrator (to use the current term); and a Klan-linked gangster; also Lydia Lee, the taklousa woman who runs the bar above which Joe lives; Sammy Noukouwa, a nasty takouma who has wholly bought into the Aztec myth; and the various members of a jazz band with whom Joe plays. One of the most beautiful things about the book is the descriptions of Joe while he's playing jazz -- writing about music is hard, I think, and these scenes are just wonderful -- they get the emotions of both playing and listening spot on. I wanted to be there! 

This is a first rate novel, and it succeeds in multiple ways -- as a mystery, as a political thriller, as alternate history, and as a love story. It's involving throughout. It's both optimistic and pessimistic -- a tragedy perhaps, but with elements of triumph, a hopeful story that we know might resolve years in the future either happily or darkly -- but most likely a mixture, just like the real world. Highly recommended.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

Review: In Memoriam: A Novel of the Terran Diaspora, by Fred Lerner

by Rich Horton

Fred Lerner is a long-time SF fan, and I've known him for several years, meeting him once or twice a year at conventions. I read and enjoyed his story "Rosetta Stone", which appeared in Ian Randal Strock's Artemis way back in 2000, and I was happy when he told me a few years ago that he was writing a novel set in that story's future (though not really directly related.) That novel appeared last year -- In Memoriam, from Fantastic Books.

It's narrated by David Bernstein. As the novel opens, he's finishing his final year of school before going to college. And he's attending a performance staged by the alien race that is native to the planet on which he lives. We learn quickly that these aliens, the Wyneri, rescued the survivors of the Cataclysm, which wiped out humanity on Earth, a couple of centuries prior to this story. The couple of thousand who were rescued have been fruitful enough that the human population is about 30,000 -- living in small chapters embedded among the Wyneri. The humans have been gifted one island, on which they have built a University, and to which they go once each year for the Ingathering. And this Remnant, as they style themselves, devote themselves to preserving as much knowledge of Terran history and culture as they can. 

Their relations with the Wyneri appear cordial enough, but both populations appear mostly to ignore each other. So David's interest in Wyneri art, and, soon after, his close friendship with a Wyneri girl named Harari, are considered decidedly unusual. The Wyneri are very humanoid (indeed, it's hinted that David and Harari are tempted to have a sexual relationship, but they decide not to go that far.) It turn out that many among the Wyneri are disgusted by David and Harari's friendship -- and so are many of the humans.

There are some shocking instances of violence, before and after David and Harari go to their separate universities. But the two of them have already discovered something very surprising about the Cataclysm and the Wyneri rescue operation. David, at his university, forms close relationships with many fellow students, and realizes that there are factions in the human Remnant who are pushing for Terran's to disassociate from the Wyneri, perhaps even to return to the Solar System. And there are increasingly active factions among the Wyneri that are hostile to Terrans. The situation becomes terribly threatening -- and David finds himself forced to a fairly prominent position, especially regarding the information he and Harari have found. The results will profound change both societies.

The novel is consistently interesting, and the society Lerner portrays in intelligently put together. David and his friends are characters we root for. Lerner's Jewish background contributes to much of this -- not just the fact that David and his family maintain Jewish traditions, but the obvious analogies with the "Terran Diaspora" of this novel, and the Jewish Diaspora, not to mention the Terrans situation as "strangers in a strange land" among the Wyneri. There are certain aspects I thought a bit underdeveloped, and I will say the dialogue doesn't always convince -- the characters speak as if reciting essays at times. But these are quibbles -- I enjoyed the novel, and cheered for its humanistic message.


Sunday, January 19, 2025

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

a review by Rich Horton

Last year at Windy City Pulp and Paper convention, I got a copy of André Breton's Nadja, a surrealist novel first published in 1928. I hasten to add that Nadja is in no way a "pulp", not even by the debased criteria that labels paperback novels with salacious content "pulp". Instead it was a gift from a friend, another attendee of the convention. This copy is a recent Grove Press printing of a 1960 translation by the fine poet Richard Howard. (It turns out that, shortly after Howard's translation appeared, Breton produced a revised version of Nadja, that has not yet been translated into English.)

André Breton (1896-1966) was a French writer and the leader of the surrealistic movement in literature, author of the Surrealist Manifesto. He studied medicine, worked in a mental hospital, and, after the first World War, started a magazine, Littérature. He wrote prolifically for the rest of his life: poetry, novels, criticism (of literature and art), theory. He was a prolific art collector. He spent much of the Second World War in the US, as his politics and artistic attitudes were distasteful (to say the least) to the Vichy Regime.

Nadja remains, as far as I can tell, Breton's best known novel, though Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), with Philippe Soupalt; and L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) also have a reputation. Nadja is quite short, a bit less than 25,000 words in the English translation, though there are also 44 black and white photographs (including reproductions of drawings supposedly by the character Nadja). Surrealtistic writing supposedly includes "automatic writing", but I don't really see evidence of that here. And, at risk of forfeiting my avant garde membership card, the novel didn't really do a lot for me.

The book is narrated by a man named André, clearly the author himself. It opens with a long section discussing his life in Paris in the 1920s, the milieu, his friends, and his theories about surrealism and literature in general. Some strange movies are discussed, particularly one set at a grils' school, seeming to depictg the murder of one of the girls by the headmistrass and her friend. The actress, a friend of his, is mentioned. This is all a tad rambling though of some interest.

The long middle section is about Nadja, a mysterious and pretty young womman with whom the married narrator has a brief romance. Their affair consists of several rendezvous at restaurants and such, of discussions of their philosophies, and eventually of a revelations about Nadja -- that she is having mental problems, due to a death in the family, and that hshe is under pscychological care. After which the narrator abandons her, apparently because her oddly surrealistic philosophy of life is revealed to be a sympton of her mental illness. The final section concludes by discussing the narrator's continued devotion to his theories. 

If I had more sympathy with surrealism as a theory of life and art, rather than a sometimes interesting method of displaying reality at on odd angle, I might have enjoyed it more. It is well written, and the translation seems good. I also find surrealism more interesting in visual art, and in poetry, than in prose fiction. But that's just my taste I suppose. I'm glad I read the book, but in the end it's not quite my thing.