This chapter analyzes four portraits that express the limits and potential of Mexico's twentieth-century modernity. The photographs were made by, respectively, Tina Modotti, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, and Elsa Medina, four women whose work represents an outsider's perspective related to a combination of factors including gender, photographic subject matter, economic background, national origin, and politics. All four portraits instantiate the creativity, skill, artistry, and hard work of their creators. Their testament to women's accomplishments in photography echoes their socially critical content, from the subtle critique of patriarchy evident in the portrayal of a female sculptor, in Horna's image, to the stark depiction of desperation at the nation's borders, in Medina's. The chapter aims to provide its readers with an overview of the work of four prominent photographers and of different approaches to enunciating the potential within and imagining subjectivities beyond the limits of modernity.

Reviewed by: New and Selected Stories by Cristina Rivera Garza Ryan Long Cristina Rivera Garza New and Selected Stories Trans. Sarah Booker, Francisca González Arias, Lisa Dillman, Cristina Rivera Garza & Alex Ross. St. Louis. Dorothy Project. 2022. 280 pages. ENGLISH-LANGUAGE readers finally have the chance to enter into the beguiling, menacing, and strangely poignant world that one of Mexico's best writers creates through her short stories. Their original dates of publication span more than thirty years, from La guerra no importa (1991) to the forthcoming Diminutus. The collection includes nearly twenty-five stories, only six of which have appeared in English before. Sarah Booker has translated most of them. The consistently high quality of all the translations makes apparent not only the changes in Rivera Garza's themes and style but also the way that the stories share an urgent search for meaning and connection. Unfamiliar languages and uncanny spaces frustrate this search, and Rivera Garza's frequent narrative distance and detached tone refuse easy intimacy. In its place lies a guiding tension between the desire to belong and an unsettling awareness of inhabiting landscapes defined by isolation, cruelty, prejudice, and catastrophe. Because they impede identification, the stories succeed at placing their characters and readers in similar states of disorientation. This in turn piques the reader's interest and intensifies the characters' desire for companionship and a place to call home. A salient example of how such yearning underlies many stories appears in "Strange Is the Bird That Can Cross the River Pripyat," originally from the 2008 collection La frontera más distante. Its third-person narrator describes the way an old man's voice conjures "That kind of longing. That kind of form that longing sometimes takes." The gap between longing and the form it takes crystallizes a distinction between perception and experience that runs throughout the collection and often becomes visible through references to windows. In "Offside," also from Frontera, a woman who stops for gas during a snowstorm finds herself in a forever snowy town whose inhabitants speak a language she cannot understand. The eerie indifference with which the first-person narrator and protagonist is treated by the locals, including the man with whom she begins a family, finds an anxious echo in her description of looking outside before returning to her car, which years earlier she had been told had vanished: "The condensation made me think that the world was nothing more than a great, steamed-up windshield, and this thought provoked in me a silent fit of tears." The narrator's plight in "Offside" is common to many of the collection's female characters, who face multiple dangers, including kidnapping in "Like Bitches, Like She-Devils," originally from Guerra, and disappearance in "City of Men," from Frontera. Peril is matched by bravery, a trait associated with, among others, the female journalist who travels to the eponymous male-only city and the woman who drives a car away from a rapidly approaching fire in the story from Diminutus titled "My Voice in Sin Narrates." The driver in "My Voice," the first-person narrator of "Revenge," also from Diminutus, and the Young Woman, the moniker of one of the main characters in "Strange Is the Bird," face collective threats, respectively: wildfires like those that plague California; an enclosed shambles of a community complete with "border walls"; and that which the Young Woman observes in Pripyat, "From the other side of the window: the remains of a nuclear power plant." Here, another surface through which one of Rivera Garza's characters describes what she sees reveals a looming danger and signals that her characters' struggles to leave Chernobyl may afflict us all. The outward succession of circles from seemingly limited spaces, some fantastical and others actual, to our own experiences as readers, creates another set of barriers and windows. These in turn demand responses to the destruction enabled by alienation, ignorance, neglect, and exclusion, responses that a more realist and identification-driven writer might offer, but whose sincerity or ability to communicate what's really at stake Rivera Garza's narrators and characters would likely regard with suspicion. Ryan Long University of Maryland Copyright © 2022...

0 independence of thought. Among the rarely discussed historical facets Ābele’s novel illuminates are the deportation of “undesirable ” Latvians by secret KGB operations, the intricacies of social relationships for those outside the government under USSR rule, and the regional differences within Latvia and Latgale, both historically and today. Where both Ābele’s writing and Moseley ’s translation shine are in the seamless flow between plot and imagery. Sentences like “The girls’ faces become translucent, illuminated by the sap of life as if by oranges cast in bronze” are apt to catch readers by surprise amidst paragraphs of realistically rendered desolation. This is also where the novel reveals its necessity for some prerequisite understanding, however: images like this can be obtuse, and very little of the book’s length is given to scene-setting, so those unfamiliar with Latvian geography or language will likely get lost in the unusual turns of phrase and extensively researched details. It is also worth noting that neither Ābele nor Moseley flinches from using period-accurate language that not infrequently includes slurs and bigoted generalizations. As the narrator, Andrievs, notes in a rare moment of interiority, “History is as secure a refuge as a hay-rack in a storm, and yet, it is a refuge.” The refuge of World War II–era history, so long confined to anglophone experiences, is being brought into the light by Ābele and Moseley in this volume, in all its grit and complexity. Linda Stack-Nelson Minneapolis Eduardo Halfon Canción Barcelona. Libros del Asteroide. 2021. 128 pages. EDUARDO HALFON’S LATEST novel explores the power of naming and appearance and what they conceal, and the vulnerabilities experienced by those who reach beyond them. Its narrator calls his grandmother’s cousin Uncle Salomón even though he’s not his uncle. The story opens with the narrator’s arrival in Tokyo for a conference dedicated to Lebanese writers even though his Lebanese grandfather wasn’t Lebanese; he was forced to leave before Lebanon was a country bearing that name. The deceptively pretty title alludes to a killer known for his singsong voice. Salomón reads the future in Turkish coffee grounds. When the narrator is a child, he witnesses his uncle’s last reading , the session interrupted by the arrival of soldiers to his grandfather’s Guatemala City mansion, an enormous house that, the narrator recalls, suddenly felt very small. The soldiers are there to tell the grandfather they’ve located one of the men who kidnapped him in 1967. Their visit brings no solace, their news no closure. The fear that caused the house to shrink put an end to Salomón’s interpretive efforts, but it is at the heart of the narrator’s lifelong search to understand his grandfather and Guatemala ’s puzzling and frightening pasts. Openness to uncertainty and an acknowledgment of shifting origins permit affinities that others, like the writers in Tokyo who contest the narrator’s Lebanese heritage, would prefer to regulate and even disqualify altogether. The narrator’s changing position along multiple ambiguous geographical, social, and cultural crossroads —he’s Jewish, Guatemalan, of Syrian or Lebanese descent, of a privileged economic class, and a writer who once studied engineering—mirrors this extraordinary novel’s combination of lucidity and structural sophistication, moving subtly as it does back and forth through several moments and places, from the room where the grandfather’s kidnappers held him to the bar where, decades later, the narrator met a woman whom, years earlier, the narrator’s father identified as one of his father’s kidnappers. When the narrator meets her, she says, “Tú eres Halfon,” at once enmeshing him in the murky world of the Guatemalan Civil War’s aftermath and establishing an affinity between fiction and autobiography that unsettles generic divisions. Canción’s portrayals of social and political complexity avoid easy judgment. The text’s insistence upon facing instead of concealing difficult truths about affiliations and origins makes plausible and important that which in the hands of a lesser writer would risk being trite—for example, the narrator’s attraction to and conversations with an organizer of the conference in Tokyo, whose grandfather was maimed when the...

Reviewed by: McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada Ryan Long Brescia, Pablo, y Oswaldo Estrada, editores. McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana. Albatros Ediciones, 2018. 270 pp. Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada’s anthology opens and closes with the contributions of Pedro Ángel Palou, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Naief Yehya. Its final section is a group interview that took place just after ¿Nuestra América? Pasado y futuro de la nueva narrativa latinoamericana, the 2016 conference whose presentations became the starting point for the anthology. In the interview, Palou recalls that, during two public presentations of the Crack, including the initial reading of its manifesto in 1996, Ignacio Padilla was absent and that his brother stood in for him, apparently unannounced and in an effort to convince audiences that he was, in fact, the Padilla they came to see. Attention to historical details and the effects of mistaken identities are useful starting points for evaluating the anthology’s important contribution to recent and contemporary Latin American literary history and criticism. The book’s first section consists of four chapters written, respectively, by Paz Soldán, Palou, Yehya, and Rivera Garza. The chapters that make up the remaining three sections are written by students, professors, and other scholars from Europe and the Americas. Framing the anthology with texts and interview statements by writers foregrounds one of the book’s central contributions, its detailed history of the ways in which several forces overlap in the formation of literary fields. These include primarily academia, publishing houses, cultural journalism, original language and translation markets, and the two group efforts identified in the anthology’s title, the Crack and McOndo. Brescia’s chapter emphasizes how much Latin American literature has been defined as a field from within the United States. Brescia’s emphasis thus complements Rivera Garza’s observations in her chapter about how important it is to recognize that many contemporary writers are also academics in the US, including Palou, Paz Soldán, and herself. The institutional boundary crossings germane to this fact are similar to the other complexities related to defining Latin American literature in the present, which several chapters address. The importance of the Spanish publishing industry and US academia call into question, for example, the coherency of traditional geographically bound ways of conceiving Latin America as an organizing principle for literary history. The cosmopolitanism and attention to Latin Americans living in the US that helped define the Crack and McOndo from the beginning are thus prescient. On the other hand, chapters by Rita De Maeseneer and Catalina Quesada-Gómez, about the Caribbean and Colombia, respectively, demonstrate the need for considerations of local and regional contexts, whose specificities might otherwise be blurred by discussions of hemispheric and global trends, be they aesthetic or, as is more often the case, economic. The historical details elucidated and questioned by the writers who contribute to the anthology—from Yehya’s critique of the so-called culture of excellence that began to permeate the UNAM in the 1980s to Rivera Garza’s description of [End Page 859] the Crack and McOndo anthologies as “hechas por hombres para ser consumidas por hombres” (259)—put the eponymous movements in their places more than most of the literary historical chapters do. For example, De Maeseneer argues convincingly that the movements’ relevance is at least as much a product of critics and historians as it is of the texts their authors have written, including founding anthologies and manifestos. Here is where the question of mistaken identity arises. Are the Crack and McOndo strong enough phenomena, as foundational moments, to sustain a literary history organized around them? Or, with all due respect to Bob Dylan, are some critics seeing them less for what they are then what they’re not? Tomás Regalado López’s history of the Crack proves that it deserves the attention he gives it, for the writers who comprise it and for, again, that observation that, in part, guides the whole anthology, “la función de la crítica como instancia mediadora clave” (87...

Reviewed by: Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature by Ignacio Sánchez Prado Ryan Long Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Northwestern UP, 2018. 233 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8101-3755-4. Territorially based literary histories can hide fascinating lines of inquiry. World literature does not reliably solve this problem. Global commonalities obscure local specificities. Entire traditions become exceptions to a dominant, allegedly universal system. The first chapter of Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s groundbreaking history of Mexican literature from the 1960s to the present is about Sergio Pitol. It proves that a single author’s career can illuminate more than studies with plainly national, regional or global ambitions often do by investigating a range of topics within which an author functions as a nodal point of material practices, ideas, and texts. Sánchez Prado’s emphasis on Pitol’s work as a translator decenters discussions of Mexican politics and culture that tend to focus too much on the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America. For example, Pitol’s translations of Lu Hsun and Boris Pilniak reflects his interest in reading and making accessible writers whose work challenges official culture. These writers’ uneasy or even fatally dissenting relations (in the case of Pilniak) to their governments and established cultural norms appeal to Pitol because they demonstrate literature’s capacity for resistance and because they are similar to iconoclastic and cosmopolitan writers and movements in Mexico. Pitol’s engagement with and promotion of literary traditions not often associated with Mexico or Latin America places him in literary circuits decentered in a way similar to the political circuits that motivated his translations, which Sánchez Prado shows in readings of Pitol’s story, “Nocturno de Bujara,” written in Moscow in 1979 and 1980, and the novel El desfile del amor, written in Czechoslovakia and Spain in 1983 and 1984. Pitol’s work for pioneering Spanish publishing houses, Tusquets and Anagrama, provides a transition to the book’s second chapter about Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, and Pedro Ángel Palou. Sánchez Prado contextualizes the Crack in the consolidation of the publishing industry that began to intensify in the 1980s. He reads Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (1999), Padilla’s Amphytrion (2000) and La Gruta del Toscano (2006), and Palou’s Paraíso clausurado (2000), in order to situate them at the intersections of multiple traditions, themes, and forms, including the Contemporáneos, Renaissance literature, Nazism, and the thriller. Sánchez Prado explicates [End Page 151] the Crack’s coherency, while distinguishing its practitioners. Volpi writes a global novel; Padilla challenges the representational foundations of the witness, and Palou defines the loss of certain literary voices and traditions as “a politics of representation” (138) that demarcates aesthetic limits and possibilities. His original and insightful readings of Volpi’s, Padilla’s, and Palou’s texts help Sánchez Prado place them in relation to both Pitol’s cosmopolitan genealogy and the topic of his final chapter, Mexican women writers and the 1990s “Boom femenino.” Strategic Occidentalism juxtaposes the remarkable success of late twentieth-century women writers to the exceptional status afforded them previously. Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, and Inés Arredondo, for example, were outliers in a definitively masculine field. It is especially valuable for understanding Mexican literary history amidst global changes in publishing and a dismaying consistency in the worldwide reception of Latin American literature (such as an expectation of exoticism fulfilled by latter day magical realism), as is Sánchez Prado’s analysis of the market pressures exacerbated for women writers, such as pigeonholing and marketing their work in typically disrespected genres like the romance novel. Strategic Occidentalism elucidates strategies for negotiating these pressures by focusing on three writers: Carmen Boullosa, Ana García Bergua, and Cristina Rivera Garza. Boullosa’s pirate novels, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) and El médico de los piratas (1992), showcase her transformation of a non-national source text and her skill at presenting historical language as a product of power relations specific to a certain time and place. García Bergua’s...

Author(s): Long, Ryan | Abstract: Sanchez Lopera, Alejandro. Jose Revueltas y Roberto Bolano: Formas genericas de la experiencia. Raleigh, NC: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2017. 276 p p .

Reviewed by: Understanding Roberto Bolaño by Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat Ryan Long Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo. Understanding Roberto Bolaño. Columbia: The U of South Carolina P, 2016. 238 pp. ISBN: 978-16-1117-648-3. Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat's outstanding book forms part of the "Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature" series, placing Roberto Bolaño alongside nearly fifty other writers, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Marcel Proust, Christa Wolf, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Octavio Paz. Bolaño's readers may wonder how he would respond to sharing a list with Paz, a target for criticism of the actual Infrarealist and fictional Visceral Realist poets. Regardless of what that response could be, Bolaño is institutionalized, if not canonized. By dint of its existence, Gutiérrez-Mouat's book attests to this fact, at once presupposing and reinforcing Bolaño's literary historical importance. Gutiérrez-Mouat does not justify Bolaño's recognition, perhaps because he deems it unnecessary. In fact, his book [End Page 166] does something much more useful than that. Written for an audience determined by the parameters of the series to consist chiefly of undergraduates, graduate students, and general readers, Understanding Roberto Bolaño succeeds in developing an exceptionally clear, concise, and thorough explication of Bolaño's oeuvre, from the poetry collection published in 1976, Reinventar el amor, to the posthumous novel, 2666, published in 2004. Gutiérrez-Mouat's lucid style, logical organization, and judicious pacing guarantee his book's accessibility. He combines biographical, literary, and historical context, summary, and formal analysis (often narratological) in such a way that his readers will be able to situate Bolaño's works in relation to one another and his oeuvre in relation to those of other Latin American and world writers. Gutiérrez-Mouat's readers will also find ample inspiration for investigating further the numerous research topics his book introduces, including the relationships of poetry and prose, the reconfiguration of the detective figure and the crime novel genre, and literature's capacity for political critique. Gutiérrez-Mouat presents Bolaño's work almost entirely chronologically, in order of composition. The only exceptions are sections about select stories and Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011), which appears reasonably and helpfully just before 2666. The book begins with Bolaño's poetry and then continues with novels written but not necessarily published prior to 1996, the year of Bolaño's first major publications, La literatura nazi en América and Estrella distante, and then proceeds through Los detectives salvajes (1998), Amuleto (1999), Nocturno de Chile (2000), and Una novelita lumpen (2002), before concluding with the story collections, including the posthumous El secreto del mal (2007), Sinsabores, and 2666. The book's chronology gives readers a strong sense of Bolaño's development, an emphasis that, though logical and certainly viable on the whole, occasionally straightens the circuitous path Bolaño's work often takes, such as its constant returns to a central group of topics, among them reading and writing, the avant-garde, intermediality, gender and sexuality, and political violence. In addition to chronology, the book emphasizes biography. It combines detailed information about Bolaño's life with excellent summaries and readings of his work. Gutiérrez-Mouat does not fall prey to biographical determinism but instead deftly negotiates relevant facts of Bolaño's life together with helpful discussions of autobiography and autofiction. Though aimed primarily at students, Understanding Roberto Bolaño is of great interest to established scholars as well. It offers perhaps the best complete study of Bolaño so far, especially in regard to contextualizing his work in terms of biography, autobiography, genre, theme, and the ways in which his different texts evince and maybe even rely upon interrelations with one another. Gutiérrez-Mouat's scholarship is remarkable. He clarifies difficult questions regarding dates of composition; he reminds readers of less-familiar titles, such as the short story, "El contorno del ojo" (1983); and he has a very keen eye for detail, which, combined with his knowledge of several literary traditions, helps him elucidate important aspects of texts that would probably otherwise...

Sumana Roy Missing New Delhi. Aleph. 2018. 261 pages. Missing, Sumana Roy’s first novel after her highly acclaimed first work of nonfiction, is a modern retelling of the oldest Hindu epic, the Ramayana. Will the present-day Sita, Kobita in the novel, meet the same fate? We will never know, as she remains missing through the entire novel. What we do know from the other characters’ reminiscences about her is that she is the one who is in charge. Her husband, Nayan, who is blind, depends on her for everything in the day-today business. Kobita is a social worker, too, and her concern for a young girl molested in the heart of Guwahati makes her pack her bags and go to a strife-torn and floodravaged Assam in search of the girl. Soon, it is Kobita herself who goes missing, as her phone calls to Nayan stop coming. While the Ramayana was about bringing back Sita from the clutches of Ravana and the war that ensued, Missing portrays the internal war that goes on in Nayan, as he tries to come to terms with the feeling of missing his wife. The seven days narrated in the novel are filled with moments of despair, hope, anxiety, anger, and anticipation for Nayan. It doesn’t help that their son is far away in a foreign country and he is surrounded by people who have their own issues to deal with. The novel is peppered with clips from the daily newspaper, for which Nayan employs a young girl, and soon it becomes difficult to distinguish between news and fiction. In the age of “breaking news,” news has become stranger than fiction. Missing is not a racy mystery novel, as some may assume from its title. One needs to read it slowly. Missing’s poetic tenor grows on you. Sumana Roy’s Missing reads like the name of its protagonist, Kobita, the Bengali word for a poem. The missing is not only physical but metaphorical, too. Sumit Ray Darjeeling, India Roberto Ransom Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists Trans. Daniel Shapiro. Chicago. Swan Isle Press. 2018. 177 pages. Roberto Ransom’s openings are not just that. The first story in Missing Persons is about a pet lizard grown big enough to devour its adoptive family. Ransom’s ingenuity lies in drawing out this topic’s surprising means of presenting caregiving and loss. The first story’s unexpected developments parallel its relation to the other stories. Who could foresee a series of nuanced and unsettling tales about memory, art, betrayal, and divinity from a volume that begins with a housebound Godzilla? Perhaps someone who pays close attention to first sentences, or who reads things at least twice, because— and it took me a while to notice—Ransom employs anaphora especially well. “Lizard à la Heart” begins, “The bathroom hasn’t been open for days. Under the door, as always, it smells like a swamp.” Though syntactically nothing is missing, the words “for days” and “always” map out mysterious antecedents and seductive postcedents for the unsuspecting reader. What happened? What’s next? This is an appetizer for the initial sentences of later stories, all in David Shapiro’s superb translation from Ransom’s original Desaparecidos , animales y artistas (1999). The beautiful elaboration of the capricious time of artistic labor that characterizes “Three Figures and a Dog” begins, “He liked to be in the chapel at dawn and also in the afternoon when something similar, though not identical, occurred. For that to happen, he had to leave home when his wife got up to milk the cow.” “Something similar” and “that” are more syntactic anaphora than those that open “Lizard” because they leave their possible referents reliant upon World Literature in Review 78 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 (a still unknown) context. One protagonist of “Three Figures” is a medieval Italian painter. Another is a contemporary art historian who tries to restore old paintings whose figures and colors are barely visible beneath the tracks of time. In this story, Ransom transposes anaphora to the whole text, structurally and thematically. The postcedent of the first protagonist’s story, which involves inspiration’s fickleness and a strange dog, becomes the...

Reviewed by: México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño. Memoria y territorio by Fernando Saucedo Lastra Ryan Long Saucedo Lastra, Fernando. México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño. Memoria y territorio. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015. 204 pp. There are probably as many ways to approach Roberto Bolaño's work as there are novels, short stories, essays, and poems in his oeuvre. In general, scholarship about Bolaño's writing falls into one or more of three categories: to consider a text by Bolaño in order to write about a broader theme, such as writing, violence, the nature of evil, adolescence, or the Latin American left; to conduct a close reading of a single text in order to elucidate its meaning; or to devise a way of connecting several of Bolaño's texts in order to identify traits that define and unite them. This final approach has perhaps the most potential to benefit Bolaño scholars and general readers alike while it also raises the risks of inadvertently highlighting omitted texts and simplifying the category employed to characterize an entire body of work. In México en la obra de Roberto Bolaño, Fernando Saucedo Lastra takes the third approach, and he organizes his book around the self-evident but complicated topic of how Bolaño represents Mexico, a country that significantly affected Bolaño's life and writing. Saucedo Lastra identifies instances of Mexico as a topic in Bolaño's prose fiction, starting with La senda de los elefantes (1984) (better known by its second title, Monsieur Pain [1999]) and ending with 2666 (2004). He aims to explain what Mexico denotes, connotes, and symbolizes in the context of each separate text and as the product of connections among texts, and he proceeds in a generally teleological fashion. Highlighting the importance of Bolaño's departure from Mexico in 1977, when the author was still a young man, Saucedo Lastra's book argues that a return to Mexico in Bolaño's work evolves and intensifies over the years, appearing especially clearly and substantially in the longest and most complicated novels, Los detectives salvajes (1998) and 2666. Saucedo Lastra concludes that Mexico tends to be associated in Bolaño's work with memory, nostalgia, violence, mystery, and myth. The development of this conclusion succeeds and fails along lines that correspond to the difficulties associated with approaching an author's entire work, mentioned above. Saucedo Lastra's readings of specific texts are often very good but the comprehensive category of Mexico his conclusion sustains, ends up being somewhat disappointing for being insufficiently nuanced and for failing to explain why some texts were either insufficiently considered or omitted. Especially good are Saucedo Lastra's convincing and detailed readings of Detectives and 2666. Regarding the former, he explains how this novel portrays the instability of time and space, a topic particularly relevant to his discussion of the palimpsest that maps out the nomadic lives and legacies of Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Saucedo Lastra's very careful and perceptive analysis of 2666 will serve as an exceptionally thorough guide for scholars because of its clear and comprehensive explication of the novel's structure. Also helpful is the taxonomy of Mexico as it appears in Bolaño's work, which Saucedo Lastra develops over the course of the book, a taxonomy that will no doubt be a good starting point for further investigations into the topic of how Bolaño represents Mexico. Overall, Saucedo Lastra's book [End Page 502] presents its readers with a well-written, clearly organized, and comprehensive analysis of a topic crucial for understanding Bolaño's work and life. One of the pitfalls of identifying a unifying theme for understanding a body of work as substantial as Bolaño's is the risk of leaving something out. While I would not expect total comprehensiveness, the omission of a sustained discussion of Amuleto (1999), to my mind one of the best novels there is about the events of 1968 in Mexico, is an odd choice. A reading of the short story, "Últimos atardeceres en la tierra" (2001), would have helped develop Saucedo Lastra's...

conditioned in large part by British colonialism —but the poet doesn’t merely turn his book into a chronicle of violence (although there are anecdotal poems about murder and rape); he turns it into a personal journey into areas of history and class, clans and nation, family and fatherhood. Although Channer’s poetry (like Claude McKay’s Constab Ballads [1912]) is a significant work of what a critic has called “ethnographic modernism,” it is less traditional in its verse forms and confessional lyrics. Distinguished by a strong oral sense, it mixes Jamaican patois and American English, Rasta and reggae, also mixing voices in short and long forms as it progresses from the history and nature of the Jamaican police force to moving poems about “mounds of buried hurt” in Caribbean society, where people are caught in an ordained sociology of poverty, humiliation, and other indignities. Providential begins with Channer’s own father and how his days on the force affected his family and the very idea of fatherhood. It includes a retrospective vision (in New England) by the poet of his Jamaican childhood as well as a contemporary exploration of the challenges of trying to be a better father for his own teenage son, Makonnen. His penultimate poem, “Knowing We’ll Be Mostly Wrong,” concludes: “We begin to fail the second we invest in the speck / that makes the children. We do right, / knowing we’ll be mostly wrong.” Although the collection sometimes reveals poems that seem unfinished or lacking in closure, it is an interesting volume that escapes the trap of colonial exoticism. Keith Garebian Mississauga, Ontario Juan Gelman. Oxen Rage. Trans. Lisa Rose Bradford. Normal, Illinois. co•im•press. 2015. 376 pages. The title rings true. Juan Gelman’s Oxen Rage embodies tremendous tension (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 28). Submission and anger compete within and among the collection ’s poems, which Gelman wrote between 1963 and 1968. These are only two of the states and emotions the poems negotiate and transform. Tenderness, eroticism, fear, scorn, exuberance, and joy clash and work together across the volume’s dozen sections and roughly 150 poems. The ambition the collection embodies is heightened when Gelman creates additional poets. His “translations ” of John Wendell and Yamanokuchi Ando are in fact Gelman’s own poems. The collection’s energy and the craft that transmits it come to the fore through Gelman’s unpredictable forms, sonorous neologisms, and materialist imagery. One poem, “VI (planetas),” exemplifies abundance and unpredictable force by shifting abruptly among subjects and portraying connections between an “I” and a “You” that are not confined by the poem’s structure or the world it creates. Tree branches that cry or sing in this piece find analogues in poems that also associate voice with tactility, such as “Himno de la victoria”(Victory hymn) and “Casualidades”(Strokes of luck), both of which relate singing with sewing. The latter includes these lines, well translated by Lisa Rose Bradford: “how can i be sung at this point / by an entire population that piecemeals me / half toward frenzy half toward pleasance? / how are they to stitch me back together again?” At the level of word and image, organizational tension bursts at the seams. Consider the synesthesia and indirect apostrophe that open the poem titled “I”: “some sound of life / like the orange in the boy / would everyone hear it / rustling in your voice?” Bradford’s translation occasionally alters the original poem’s meaning, as when it attributes subjects to verbs that remain ambiguous in the Spanish, but her skill and evident effort pay off. For instance, Bradford meets the challenge of preserving the neologistic play with sound in “de amor entre las bestias un gran ejemplo jemplo” by rendering it as “of love between creatures as a great illustration may well lusterate.” Throughout Oxen Rage, Gelman’s evocations of materiality take special form as words that resist referentiality. Bradford’s impressive translation presents Gelman well to English-language readers and thus invites and challenges an expanded audience to become part of his poetry’s sharpedged world, with all its dangers and pleasures dynamically intact. Ryan Long University of Maryland Nathalie Handal. The Republics. Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press...