Books in Brief

---

Autumn is the season of corduroy and comfort. But winter is coming. It’s time to charge our batteries with that old immortal energy. 

These new books will keep you occupied and inspired in the coming months. 

—The Editors

---

An American living in Israel, Marcela Sulak is an accomplished poet, translator and Managing Editor of The Ilanot Review. Her latest collection of poems, The Fault, speaks powerfully to the personal while illuminating the universal.

These are interior poems, dealing with domestic issues and exchanges with a live-in boyfriend and a daughter, among others—and they are tender and at times surreally humorous.

Objects and settings take on psychic and physical power in The Fault, like a feather quilt that becomes a kind of phantasmagoric memento of a deceased mother; a house that must be fed and nurtured; and an artist’s print that takes on a life of its own.

There is warm candor throughout these poems, but there is also a brutal honesty and a veering of the imagination into dark parts of the psyche, like in the poem “The Spider.” 

Yesterday I cried until there was no yogurt left
until all my mother’s cabbages rolled out
of the hallway closet, until the river crouched
into a green pool and blinked, I cried
until the too much order signaled its disorder
until a box filled with little bars of soap
appeared until the spider finished rolling
up its white package of meat in the garden …

There is a sureness, an authority of language throughout the book, a sense of command if not control, as Sulak’s words wend and wind down the page with sometimes startling enjambments that never feel flashy—the formal choices are always apt. 

Reading Sulak’s poems gives the impression that she’s got a tight hold of the reins of language even if she’s not always sure where she’s going when she sets out. The result is thrilling for the reader, who is guided on an adventure of words with confidence that the poet has a destination, but also the feeling that there’s enough risk and uncertainty to make it interesting. 

A lovely, honest ambiguity about relationships and motherhood run through the book, which gives glimpses into Sulak’s life as a writer, mother, professor and romantic partner. Like in “The Voice,” where the final lines exude a mother’s exhausted resentment toward a newborn. 

There is also a great deal of welcome playfulness in Sulak’s language here, as in “The Bed”: 

it also might be that his child
-ren never go to bed. It might

have nothing to do with the bed
but with the pecking order.

Every time she orders a peck,
it tickles itself away

from the original sense.

It is delightful to see this playfulness even as Sulak delves into darker, more personal territory. 

Above all, The Fault espouses a great deal of experience and depth. Poems here narrate the ending of a marriage, the difficulties of raising a child, the uncertainty of entering into a new relationship, the history of Sulak’s somewhat hardscrabble parents. But all of this grave subject matter is worn lightly, and each new poem is a surprise. “The New Math” is exemplary: formally inventive but intimately familiar to most who have been in romantic relationships:

sex four times in one week ÷ our public argument at dinner =
sex two times X, your I want to see you text one workday at noon.

My four birthday presents for your four kids ÷ (your telling me when
your mother’s birthday was by telling me you’d bought flowers for her

+

the fact that you did so only because I asked you what you did that day)
> your mother phoning me on my birthday to tell me that her gift to

me would be a new pair of sunglasses – your dislike of my current pair
of sunglasses.

Sulak is a poet of real power and skill. The Fault shows her at her best: delving into the darkness but never losing her faith in light; examining the unknown, becoming enmeshed in it, but holding fast to the strength and sureness of well-wrought language. 

— Stephan Delbos

---

Perhaps more than any other novelist of his generation, Seth Rogoff is profoundly engaged with the history of literature and thought. His latest novel, The Castle, is the final installment of a trilogy of novels (including First, the Raven: A Preface from 2017 and The Kirschbaum Lectures, published in 2023) that follow Sy Kirschbaum, an expatriate translator based in Prague. This is a gripping and mind-bending engagement with Franz Kafka and his eponymous unfinished novel. 

The narrative of The Castle unfolds along multiple levels: In one, we follow Kirschbaum as he travels to the Czech village of Z. in an attempt to recover medieval religious texts from the sixteenth-century Jewish-Italian writer Jacob Rodriga. In another, we focus on Sidney Keter, from Kirschbaum’s translation of Jan Horàk’s Blue, Red, Grey, who flees Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941 only to lose the sole copy of his masterpiece, The Book of Moonlight, to a dissident anarchist named Esther Bird. In the third, we learn of the arrival of “K” in the village of Z. in 1922, where he is interrogated by a local leader, who begins to believe K is actually the biblical Cain. This sets off another narrative strand, which reimagines the story of Cain and Abel from several different angles. 

Rogoff sets himself the audacious task of weaving these disparate narrative threads together, but he accomplishes this with aplomb. This is a densely literary novel that rewards engagement and rereading. Texts within texts within labyrinths, alter egos and doppelgängers: the book is a puzzle though it is not puzzling. Instead, Rogoff’s writing is always crisp and engaging, and each of the stories he tells combines elements of postmodern narrative and traditional storytelling. 

Some of the most compelling writing in the book comes toward the end, when the language takes on the rhythmic and expressive qualities of poetry as it narrates Kafka’s slow death by tuberculosis while Kirschbaum reaches the keep of the castle through which he has been hopelessly wandering. Here the literary and visionary qualities of the text become apparent, as do Rogoff’s masterful storytelling skills:

The winter of 1924 was brutally cold. They had no money for heat, no money to feed the fire to cook. His cough started to worsen. The disease crawled from his lungs into his throat. His weight fell: 125 pounds, 124, 123, 122, 121, 120. The beast approached, the beast of illness, the beast of poverty, the beast of politics. Ghosts rose from their slumber. They rose early from their winter hibernation—Prague ghosts, Vienna ghosts, Berlin ghosts. Years before, in a letter to Milena, he wrote about playing tag with ghosts. Ghosts chasing him, he chasing ghosts, a mutual haunting: 119, 118, 117—the dim countdown to nonexistence. How many days can the hunger artist go without eating? 

At the end of The Castle, what had seemed a nearly impenetrable labyrinth of text reveals itself as a coherent and structured narrative that rises to a rhetorical height before its satisfying conclusion. It is also a conclusion to one period of Rogoff’s work as a novelist. It is thrilling to imagine where he will go from here. 

— Stephan Delbos

---

The long-awaited English translation of Czech Surrealist poet Vítězslav Nezval’s seminal work of poetic prose, A Prague Flaneur is fascinating and revealing: of Nezval, Prague, interwar politics, poetry, urbane bohemianism and romance. The writing (and translation) here is often beautiful and constantly inspiring, as Nezval’s meandering sentences encapsulate his life and life in his adopted city. 

Couched within narratives of Nezval’s rambles through Prague in a book that Nezval calls “nothing more and nothing less than an open cage,” we find vivid expositions on politics and poetics. Early in the book, Nezval takes pains to clarify his break with other Prague Surrealists and his respectful relationship with André Breton, even as he pulls away from Surrealist proscriptions about poetry: 

While much of what defines a Surrealist text or poem is the outgrowth of a mannerism established with the help of partial psychic automatism, objective chance inherited from Dadaism and the dictates of style, while the Surrealist genre was formed on the basis of this complex of influences, just as the fairy-tale genre, for example, is defined by an array of specific elements, then a variety of Surrealist pieties — such as the prohibition on a preconceived motif, the prohibition on meter and rhyme, the prohibition on a conscious focus on this or that effect — cannot be understood in the sense of the legitimate directives and proscriptions that come from within, that are derived from the inherent laws of the poetic process itself. 

Nezval’s prose offers insight into his poetic process and his ideas of what poetry is and how it works, but it does so by Surrealist association rather than academic expostulation: 

He is Christophorus carrying the Christ Child across the river. Legend has it that the child was heavy as lead. I like this legend. I like it mostly because poetry, too, is this type of conveyor of the small and light that with each step sink our feet deeper and deeper into the earth, until we are suddenly sunk up to our knees, as if crossing a bog. 

Throughout A Prague Flaneur, Nezval details his evolution into a party of one, siding with the poetic process and the imagination above and beyond political or aesthetic prescriptions. Over the course of the book, Nezval and his writing merge with Prague, the city that so allured him as a young poet from the countryside, and where he continues to find romantic, poetic and mystical inspiration: 

I will no longer make two-hour treks from the world’s ten directions just to appreciate the length of Prague streets and match them to the length of my complex sentences, in whose meanders I have tried to develop several housing blocks to which I gladly return and which I’ve isolated from each other like nocturnal isles behind an impenetrable wall of syntax. 

This edition also includes Nezval’s photographs of several of the places mentioned in the text. Even more interesting, especially for scholars, is the fact that the translation is of the rare, unexpurgated first edition which was only recently discovered. The book that Nezval published in 1938 was in fact a second version of the text, containing significant revisions he had made, mainly to soften the political focus of the original, likely due to the author’s fears of reprisal thanks to the swiftly changing political climate. Comparing the original and the expurgated text is made possible thanks to an appendix. This is a valuable and enjoyable book for anyone interested in Prague, surrealism, the interwar avant-garde and European bohemianism. 

— Stephan Delbos

---

Coming on the heels of The Translations of Seamus Heaney, The Letters of Seamus Heaney brings another enjoyable tome from the great Irish bard to bookshelves, this one edited by the renowned poet and editor Christopher Reid, a friend of Heaney’s who has also edited The Letters of Ted Hughes, among other landmark publications. 

What is fascinating here is just how public Heaney’s life and correspondence were. While the Heaney family requested that their personal correspondence be excluded from this volume, it is clear that Heaney operated at a public pitch that threatened to overwhelm him throughout his life, even more so after his public commitments multiplied upon winning the Nobel Prize in 1995 at the age of 56. 

It is fascinating too, how the letters give a sense of Heaney tightly regulating himself and his emotions as he felt pressure to perform as the “smiling public man” described by Yeats, whom Heaney refers to repeatedly throughout these letters. Heaney also cites Philip Larkin’s line about “pretending to be me.” Heaney seemed to be a man in control, at least until he had his first stroke in 2006, which proved to be the beginning of the end of his strong constitution. 

By the time Heaney won the Nobel, he had already been an international superstar poet for years, first going to Harvard in 1981, where he would teach for several decades, a position that put him in the orbit of Helen Vendler and other renowned American poets and critics. After that came the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and growing international commitments that made him a frequent flyer on Aer Lingus. Dozens of these letters are addressed from airport lounges and the flights he took back and forth from Dublin to Boston and elsewhere. 

It is interesting to see the cracks in the public persona that begin to appear in the late 1980s, as the miles began to take their toll, and when Heaney nevertheless had several decades ahead of him traveling throughout the world, fulfilling his obviously deep-seated, unshakable sense of duty to be an ambassador for poetry. In a letter to David Hammond from an airport on December 11, 1987, he writes: 

I’m in Salt Lake City airport, awaiting a delayed Boston flight, gazing at the snow-capped Rockies. It’s strange, the way things have developed, so that what was once the domain of magnificent romance becomes the humdrum of a slightly impatient, stressed, schedule-haunted, fat-bellied man. I rebuke myself for being in the land of Mormon, in the big sky of the west, and only being able to worry about the undone and overdue tasks of my life. On my way here yesterday […] I wrote fourteen letters and recommendations. I have as many more to do on the way back, and then when I land, more testimonials and blurbs. My desk is full of books[…] that I am meant to puff. I am also nowadays on appointments committees and have the work of fourteen poets to read—all applicants for a post, the shortlist already culled from an original intake of 120.

Sorry to moan. It’s just spilling out.

This is one of the few letters in this collection in which Heaney allows himself to spill out. More often, he uses the phrase “Enough” or “But enough,” which appear repeatedly throughout these letters, to rein himself in when he feels he is harping on about his own feelings and point of view. There is an aspect of selflessness to this: Heaney apparently took his public duties seriously and didn’t want to spend too much time focused on himself in correspondence, preferring to shine light on others. But one also gets the sense of a man who kept himself to himself and, at least in correspondence, remained somewhat guarded.

That guardedness is on display most clearly in letters from the mid-1980s, when Heaney is engaged with Michael Parker, author of Seamus Heaney: The Making of a Poet, whose critical study of Heaney’s poetry became more autobiographical as time went on. Heaney was quick to dissuade Parker from looking too closely into his past: 

I should be loath at this stage to give any prior assent to the publication of your researches into the biographical matter and background stuff you are assembling with the help of friends and relatives—this is all very well as a project for archives but it seems to threaten one’s privacy and resource as a writer if one thinks of it published. There are whole areas of one’s life that one wants to keep free of the gaze of print—not that there is anything to cover up but that there is a sort of emotional robbery in the uncovering.

Ultimately, and especially after the Nobel Prize, Heaney’s life and background did become public property to an extent that even he could not have foreseen. 

Expertly edited, with insightful notes and a helpful but unobtrusive scholarly apparatus, The Letters of Seamus Heaney is fascinating for the insight that it provides into Heaney’s inner life and his personal and professional relationships. His was a life that trafficked back and forth between public and private. A decade after his death we must take him at his word.