“There’s so much she hasn’t told me, and so many big obligatory questions that I didn’t touch on in this book. Like, what has it been like for my mother to live with the pain of her husband’s suicide? I can’t ask her that. I can’t even raise that question in the book, because that’s too painful. So in a way the book is constructed around these big gaping absences.”

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In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes with something more fluid, more abstract, at a different level of reading. These “word-spirits,” delineated by tildes, congeal into an amorphous work; a floating world of art and poetry. Many readers will enjoy floating along, reveling in the unique ability of poetry to generate experiences and emotions beyond the logic of language. But I look for something solid to start from, a center of gravity that helps me organize my own thoughts and reactions, even if I eventually to decide to drift.

In “Harma Hissarlik,” Yang writes, “each form/ following its intention,/ each carving/ a hidden glory.” From that image I saw the work as a sculpture garden. You can wander through the “word-spirits,” focusing on what catches your eye, skimming over what doesn’t, enjoying the accumulated atmosphere of artistic experience and expression. In “Lyric Suite,” Yang writes, “…I walked with her/ thru the lattice streets of the island/ feeling lost but safe/ …streets where people/ read and cooked, played/ chess, elders watched children,/ commerce spilled into/ conversation, her neighborhood at the city’s/ brink.” From this, I imagined being lead around a village by an elder who shared the old names and old words, telling the histories and stories that defined the village.

Ultimately, Vanishing-Line is more focused and more coherent than a sculpture garden or a village tour. In “Elegy for Ling,” he shows us, “old men sorting thru rubble, brick by brick/ rebuilding the ancient walls/ while the ring roads expand/ while machinery explodes/ the celebrity architects multiply/ ignorant of the original design.” Vanishing-Line is a work of archeology. Yang examines places, people, and cultures in time, exploring their context, their causes and effects, their implications and consequences. He displays ancient words like Clovis points; “Izdubar,” “Zagros,” “(Manittuwond then Plum/ stone, Pluym or Pruym plume Patmos)” “qayaq.” He discovers quotes like potsherds, finding value and context in lines by great poets, historical records, and direct descriptions like those of the explorer Gertrude Bell. Finally, language itself is like a geological record. A culture describes itself through the words it uses and the words it doesn’t; “Lying and deceit are unknown among them because they cannot say it.”

This act of archeology culminates in “Yennecott,” a sprawling, ambitious, brilliant exploration of the discovery, colonizing and exploitation of North America by Europeans. Yang is trying to preserve not just the events of history, but the process of those events, discovering the emotions and ideas of today in the words and stones of the past; “From the ancient base of Piraeus passage/ wharves crowded with trade, sea wine-dark// West to the ‘final stop’ of Olson’s Pacific, Ahab/ ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’// Up to the moonlandings, rockets opening prospective,/ space, secret silo sites below, disgrace, Guantánamo, Bajram.”

But we already have archeology. We have museums and history books. Why apply poetry to a problem which appears solved. In “Yennecott,” Yang writes, “Bierstadt’s stereoscopic expedition/…His Rocky Mountain Lander’s Peak/ the ‘consumable landscape,’/ …Shoshone ideal, 1864/ staged tableau painting, among one/ hundred artifacts…/…today, in the museum gallery,/ mountain grass lake bathed/ in saintly sunset, figures/ of romance concealing/ a history of devastation.” (p111) For all its aspirations of fact, history is a form of storytelling, once used to romanticize as often (or perhaps more often) as it is used to reveal. Poetry has always been one of our primary romanticizers, making it uniquely able to strip conquering historians of their romantic veneer.

Yang’s poetics of archeology continue in the “Bibliographic Note and Acknowledgments,” which is more a manifesto than the usual boilerplate citation of sources and thanking of family. Yang argues for poetry as a technique and expression of history; a compartmentalizing of human events, as all works of history are, that does not sever the inherent connections of event to event, culture to culture, person to person. Though Yang doesn’t go so far as to argue traditional history is inherently inaccurate, Vanishing-Line is an attempt to fill in what is excluded by the rigors of fact and the structures of prose. In history as we understand it, “There was a before and after/ the during consumed.” All past was once “now” and poetry speaks to “now.” To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

Different readers will have different experiences with Vanishing-Line. It can be devoured in one sitting. It can be picked at over time. Many will enjoy it as a sculpture garden or a village tour. Others will enjoy an even more transient interaction with it, drifting from “word-spirit” to “word-spirit,” content to soak up the artful arrangement of words on the page. But because so much of our poetry today seems to be focused on those isolated moments of emotion, I would urge readers to work with the harder more sustained themes in -Line. Yang is making a statement, something solid that can describe the world, and perhaps even change how we understand and interact with it. Though many readers and poets prefer to drift, to Yang, a poem is to dig.

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Dereseiwicz confronts Vonnegut’s novels from his earliest to his last, focusing on Vonnegut’s zenith in moral seriousness and the long, personal road to Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut played around with his essential question, the elegantly put “What are people for?”, in his early work, though he then lacked the artistic and rhetorical strength of the novels to come. Dereseiwicz traces Vonnegut’s evolving forms and themes from beginning to end, placing the author’s brilliant qualities alongside his more questionable and possibly self-deluded backsliding.

For the die-hard fans: This Paris Review interview with Vonnegut from 1977, in which he talks about Dresden and teaching at Iowa, covers the 10 year period surrounding the writing and publication of Slaughterhouse-Five.

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I remember a woman, a researcher from Brazil, who took my hand and said our shared name was for strong women who thought what they wanted and were good at school, remember when the tall man brought me a little tamed mouse, somehow carried from Colombia through customs in his handkerchiefed pocket. As I read The Cat’s Table, the latest novel from Michael Ondaatje, it these strangers I think of, who first built my ideals of beauty and independence and passion.

In his sixth novel, Ondaatje writes of the people we meet as children, the people who direct our gaze even late in our lives. The main character, a Sri Lankan boy also named Michael (who the author admits shares many experiences and similarities with himself, but calls fictional) narrates from adulthood the three weeks where he and his two friends learned “our lives could be large with interesting strangers.”

In 1954, he boards an ocean liner bound for England. For those three weeks, he eats at the cat’s table, the 76^th, placed farthest from the captain’s, among a vibrant group of characters—a flamboyant pianist who has “hit the skids,” a silent tailor whose ever-present red scarf hides a serious wound, a retired ship dismantler, and the two boys, Ramadhin and Cassius, who would become his companions for this journey, whose friendship would follow him far into his life.

This novel, part coming-of-age story, part mystery, part elegy for lost friends, takes place on the Oronsay, a ship resurrected from history and from Ondaatje’s previous novel, Anil’s Ghost, which becomes a sort of microcosmic circus for the three boys navigating its maze. Michael meets a wild array of passengers—a cultured thief (the Ondaatje staple), a high-security prisoner, a gracious, tentative scholar who becomes a teacher to him and his friends—and through the eyes of his eleven year old self, weaves each of their stories into a larger, sometimes diffuse but never disjointed, narrative about how we become what it is we become.

The structure of the narrative keeps even restless readers from feeling constrained to the ship, as Michael floats from 1954 to present and to many years in between, finding those he’s lost touch with, detouring to break our hearts with the short life of Rahmadhin and giving us both the tragedy of his failing heart and the redemption and loss in Michael’s marriage to Rahmadhin’s sister.

Here, as in his 1992 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, Ondaatje’s prose is, sentence by sentence, some of the most luminous, remarkable writing I’ve read. He writes with a musicality that is never over-studied, that can brighten the dim corners of a place like a flare, or can break across the page with such force that I have to read that page, that paragraph, that sentence again and again, before I set the book down to breathe.

With equally steady hand, Ondaatje paints the “lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odor), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall” and a storm the boys are caught in that “pulled the air out of our mouths. We had to turn our heads away from its rush in order to breathe, the wind buckling like metal around us … Lightening lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise.”

While arguably Ondaatje’s most accessible novel, as the only one narrated in first person, The Cat’s Table retains that essential mystery Ondaatje is known for, like Miss Lasqueti, the spinster who carries pigeons in her coat and tosses her thrillers overboard when they fail to be more interesting than her secretive life. It is in this woman, in the thieving count, in the silent daughter of a convict, in the mysteries that drift like smoke through our grasps at closure, that we find the familiar Ondaatje, the author who delights in lovely hands, a twist of the mouth, the hints of inner, unexplained lives.

The narrative can be dizzying at times, but it works because Michael’s young self is naturally skeptical and self-aware. Having been “trained into cautiousness” at boarding school, he keeps a log of strange and interesting occurrences aboard the Oronsay. And yes, the never-ending new acquaintances can be tricky to remember by name, though Michael’s careful observance of their habits makes them easy to recall. Some of the characters are briefly sketched, and serve as background details to an already colorful group of people, but we see the author’s careful hand reflected in that of the botanist, Mr. Daniels, who is transporting an Asian garden across the two seas, whose collection of exotic plants amazes even the skeptical Cassius.

This “field of colors,” loudly crowded betel leaf, snapdragon, star fruit, pencil trees, black calabash, even strychnine blossoms, eventually becomes not only a gathering place where the members of the cat’s table eat together before the journey’s overcast end, but also a vibrant image of the parti-coloured variety of the strangers—some lovely, some fragile, some dangerous—who the boys watch with unblinking stares.

In the decades after this voyage, Michael admits “It would always be strangers like them, at the various cat’s tables of my life, who would alter me,” and it’s this realization, this recognition of my own strangers that keep this story blooming in my head.

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“Certainly novels can and should take risks but maybe I feel more freedom in the short story form because if it fails halfway in, I don’t feel an urge to toss myself out the window.”

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We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please refrain from reviewing books written by people you know.

Email to: Marie AT therumpus.net

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As its title suggests, Compendium, poet Kristina Marie Darling’s second book of poetry, is a short collection of poems compiling an incomplete history. Calling the book experimental, fails to tell the whole story. For unlike some experimental poetry, that shirks narrative, abandons traditional forms, and leaves an emotional distance between reader and text, Darling toys with traditional syntax, but leaves the reader curious, hungry, longing to restore the faded portrait that she keenly leaves unfinished.

Compendium has five untitled segments, the first containing a single poem, “Palimpsest.” This is the first of many poems in the collection that seeks to document the history of people and objects. “Palimpsest” is comprised of six prose stanzas, each subtitled Chapter One, demonstrating a dismissal of linear time in the succeeding narrative. The story told in the following pages is incomplete. In these pages, history, like the palimpsest, has been rubbed away, erased.

So, what then of the story that emerges? How do these poems communicate a narrative with so much missing? Darling’s deliberate choice of words in the second section’s six prose poems gives the reader equal parts music and silence. Here we are introduced to the heroine, Madeleine, as well as her nameless companion, the connoisseur. We aren’t sure about the nature of their relationship: lovers? former lovers? master and submissive? Perhaps. Darling’s nonlinear narrative avoids answering much, but the catalog of objects appearing and reappearing throughout the book give weight to the absence of plot structure. In the first poem, “The Box,” we are dropped into an unknown place and time:

That evening, the connoisseur presented
Madeleine with an usual box. Despite its array of
glass buttons and sheet music, he explained, one
must ever open the smallest compartment.

These window-shaped poems frame the repeated images texturizing the book’s themes of deliberate solitude, unfulfilled longing, and willful containment. Objects such as lockets dangling from red silk ribbon, countless rooms, silk gloves, music boxes, distant soirees, and black taffeta gowns, become clues that attempt to bridge the gaps between the reader the narrative.

While most of these objects’ specific histories are left unaccounted, Madeleine’s inaction in the poem “The Lockets” lends the objects their emotional significance. When the connoisseur dangles the locket’s photograph in front of her, Madeleine can, “do nothing but mumble before it’s sepia glow, her own blurred image, and the tiny pinhole from which the connoisseur had painstakingly suspended it.” This simple interaction hints at the connoisseur’s control over Madeleine through objects, thus layering the feeling of haunted containment. The items catalogued here are feminine in nature: silk gloves, embellished gowns, veils and broaches. Madeleine’s frustrating lack of agency is expressed through the objects she has some control over. She specifically chooses the “most somber gown” for the rustling noise it makes as she walks. A tiny slipper adorned with ribbons contains “within its past an elegy.” Curious rituals surround each object, the specific meaning of which has long been forgotten.

Darling’s focused use of punctuation and syntax deepens the pervading sense of restriction. Each poem is roughly six sentences, give or take one, and tightly ordered and structured. We enter each poem mid-scene or often following an event, as in the poem “The Homage” which begins, “It was only after the soiree…” leaving us to wonder who was invited and what they were celebrating. Each poem also contains a line of past or future dialogue, along with at least one fragment. These poems and their mysterious tone leave the reader longing for order, story, time, setting. Fragments are incomplete vessels; quotations marks act as containers for each character’s own words. On this deep linguistic level, these poems hold back. More specifically, the poems are not capable of offering more and that is quite the point. Mystery is not merely for mystery’s sake; this purposeful lack of context allows the reader to feel lost along with Madeleine in this house of endless rooms filled with faded portraits.

A series of six, small and untitled poems in the third section initially evoked frustration before a realization emerged: the poems were created from the prose poems of the second section. The effect is satisfying. The poems’ economy of language reduces the story to only the most significant words, while paradoxically opening the tightly-contained world of the previous narrative. Collected again are trinkets, accessories, and garments: “her sanctimonious blue / ribbons” “The lockets,” “tiny bells,” and “starched skirts” float in a sea of white space. The white space on each page says just as much as the handful of carefully chosen words; history also lies in what’s missing.

The penultimate section is entirely composed footnotes for missing texts, containing historical information, definitions, and unattributed quotes. Each begins at least halfway down the page, leaving a glaring mirror of white space. By now, we know we won’t have all the answers, but we accept this fact and allow these poems to assemble new, incomplete vignettes. Much like in real relationships, what is not said becomes just as, if not more important, than what is.

Kristina Marie Darling’s Compendium is a shadow box collection of antiques, each holding other worlds and histories. Darling achieved what she set out to do: write a concise and poetic compilation of a body of knowledge. In history, as in these poems, exact truths are impossible to attain. If, as Darling suggests, language fails to tell whole truths, perhaps experimental is a just word to describe Compendium. Darling has assembled a purposefully incomplete history filled with desire, mystery, music, and silence.

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(Via Electric Literature)

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Sibling rivalry takes many forms. Whether it’s Bart and Lisa Simpson choking each other in front of the television or Cain concussing his brother Abel the outcome is usually the same– someone always wins. There’s always a favorite, a golden child. But what about those who are left second best? Often the arrow that doesn’t quite hit the mark has a fascinating trajectory of its own.

Sergey Nabokov after all suffered from a type of middle child syndrome few of us could imagine. He grew up gay in a prominent aristocratic Russian family at the turn of the century and for the most part in the shadow of his older brother, Vladimir, the family genius. From their earliest childhood, Nabokov the elder stole Sergey’s thunder with his prodigious talent and promise. Later his adult life with its often improbable twists and turns, with its polyglot successes and the way he rode the crest of a changing world all the way to America, with pitstops in Hollywood and the Ivy League, seemed charmed. He literally bridged centuries, the old and the new worlds, totalitarianism and democracy, science and art, and he did it all with an off-hand aplomb about the whole affair. No wonder poor Sergey felt insufficient.

After the family had to flee the mother country when the Communist revolution went down, Sergey, who had already acknowledged as a teen his fate as an “invert,” having attended secret drag balls and committed furtive schoolboy trysts in dark alleys with his comrades in the “Left Handed Abyssinians”, a sort of queer Emo-clique founded by Sergey and his few like-minded friends, would naturally find himself in permissive, expressive Paris. No surprise either that he’d find himself on the fringes of the great salons and art circles of the time, a back row observer at Gertrude and Alice’s, a friend and friend-with-benefits to Cocteau, on the guest list but never the guest of honor, ever a B-list celebrity in his way, living off the fumes of his aristocratic beginnings and his brother’s rising fame. It would however be the backdrop for his emergence as his own person and his eventual demise as well.

Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov offers a fascinating if fictionalized portrait of this unknown Nabokov. Sergey’s also-ran status may have shaped the younger brother’s character but his is not the story of the other Nabokov. Sergey alone is the sympathetic heart of this story. Vladimir after all was at best aloof with Sergey, and at worst officially estranged, the two often not seeing or communicating with one another for years at a time. That his brother was or would soon be a world famous novelist, poet, and scholar is almost besides the point. In fact Vladimir, or Volodya as he is more familiarly called within the Nabokov clan, is actually much less present in the novel than one would expect. Maybe that’s a good thing. He was, in Russell’s eyes at least, a bit of asshole. From his earliest disregard and even cold rejection of his little brother during their boyhood to his essential absence from most of Sergey’s adult life when both brothers were part of the waves of Russian emigres in Paris and Berlin in the twenties and thirties, Vladimir cuts an elusive figure. He represents a missing piece in the lonely puzzle of Sergey’s heart, but in the end one piece only and one which Sergey long before resigned to never really possessing.

Perhaps though a youth spent eagerly at his brother’s dismissive shoulder prepared Sergey for his participation in the dizzying Paris stratosphere in which he found himself. He had become used to almost being there, comfortable around genius if never touched by it himself. Sergey could withstand the disregard of Paris’ bright stars just easily as he could ward off its more rapacious hungers. The effective portrait Russell paints of this uncanny time and place in fact is but one of the book’s satisfying accomplishments. It’s no groupie memoir however and there is no rose-colored nostalgia at work either. The Paris circles are depicted as the venomous, back biting, social climbing snake pits that they actually were. His Gertrude Stein is not the same avuncular hostess played by Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris but instead a petty, divisive, self-appointed czarina with her own tenuous hold on her realm (and Alice B Toklas, her willing minion who gleefully does the wet work of excommunication). Russell’s Diaghilev, the great impresario of the Ballet Russe, is equally as repugnant, an obese, wheezy, whiny, debt-dodging paranoid pederast with, nonetheless, an impeccable knack for picking talent. Cocteau, more of a brother to Sergey than Vladimir himself, is treated much more favorably, if only because he was more genuinely charming and witty than the other top dogs of the demi-monde. (Many of the book’s wonderful bon-mots issue from Cocteau’s lips.) Perhaps his addiction to opium mellowed him a bit (he enabled Sergey’s own addiction to opium as well). Maybe it was that he lived with his mother, or maybe he just refused to take himself as seriously and for that appealed to Sergey the most. Like Cocteau, Sergey is an incisive observer of all the star-fucking mishegoss, but he has no illusions about himself. He learned early on he’ll never fit in anywhere, so he always seems one foot out the door no matter where he is, and that seems to suit him fine.

Paul Russell

After Paris, Sergey found himself in Berlin where he lived out the balance of his life, following a five month prison sentence for sexual deviancy imposed on him and his aristocratic Austrian lover Herman Thieme, with whom he enjoyed the longest and most fulfilling relationship of his life. Even in gay Paris Sergey had opted for an easy string of smoky evenings spent in Cocteau’s opium haze, pining always for a perfect love that despite a string of handsome and sometimes rich lovers that always seemed to escape him–none but a dashing Englishman, a Cambridge chum of Volodya’s of course, later lost in an RAF bombing raid and presumed captured or killed by the Nazis. Soon he is working for the Ministry of Propaganda, as many Russian emigres were initially supportive of the Reich and grateful to Germany for accepting them after their escape from Russia. His participation soon became less than consensual. He knew his days were numbered and is soon shipped off to a labor camp for uttering the unforgivable treason of suggesting that England was the superior civilization, most likely because it was the homeland of his one true love. He never found his Englishman by the way, and literally died trying.

Before he left Paris, though, he sought some kind of closure with his brother, some acknowledgment of their estrangement and some chance to express his love and receive Volodya’s in return. In a telling scene close to the last time they would see one another, Vladimir confesses that all of his correspondence with his brother was actually composed by his wife Vera, who never really liked or trusted the homosexual Sergey all that much anyway. Sergey realizes that the only way his brother ever revealed his soul to anyone was through his art. No wonder he was so prodigious and absorbed as a child. No wonder he disappeared from Sergey’s life, and when he was present was unable to express his love or admiration for his little brother.

In a similar way though Sergey is revealed through “his” novel. It’s a kind of Nabokovian sleight of hand Russell plays, lightly masking one story with another, building a text that is ultimately a mirror to a life, even if it is completely illusory, just like John Shade’s “shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane”, in Nabokov’s later masterpiece Pale Fire. Sergey even broaches the topic of writing a book about their heroic martyred father, but Vladimir dismisses it. “And what do you think you might produce…A sham biographie romanceé where an infinitely graduated life is reduced to an artificially crafted plot, complete with characters and dialogue and dramatic scenes that never happened–and worst of all sentimental detours into the subject’s psyche, his innermost thoughts and emotions. No, I think I’d rather see poor Father’s corpse thrown to a pack of feral dogs.

Did this conversation really occur? Who cares? That Russell exhaustively researched this novel is apparent but not obvious, and that is the book’s greatest success. It’s a great story, not a history of Sergey, but a moving portrait of his soul, and as a salon populated by the divergent personae of Picasso and Dali would bear out, a “likeness” is subject to many interpretations. Russell is showing us too that he is fully aware of the unreliable nature of his own book. But there is nothing “meta” at play here. This is in the end not another bag of Nabokov-style tricks. It is entirely Russell’s book (and Sergey’s). It is however as real an account of Sergey Nabokov as we can get, and is also well crafted, luminous, lively, urbane story of one man’s search for love. It is just as Sergey himself saw life–heartbreaking, beautiful, and in most cases absurdly tragic. His brother would (probably) be proud.

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