A few months ago, a military court in Italy found a former SS guard guilty of torturing and murdering civilians at Bolzana, a city in northern Italy better known today as the home of Otzi the Iceman Mummy than as the site of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
For reasons I can’t make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.
In When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (Granta), Evelyn Sert looks back to her twenties, when she left England for Israel in search of a place in which she might belong. She thought of Israel as a brand new place where Jews would work to build a new society.
In Cheryl Benard’s Moghul Buffet (Soho), which takes place in Pakistan, we get murders, mistaken identity, cryptic messages and a likable police detective—all the requirements of a good mystery. And it’s funny too.
David Dennings, the narrator of Ann Diamond’s new novel, Dead White Males (Livres DC Books), is a wacky hairdresser much like the one I visit every couple of months. But whereas my stylist is a filmmaker, Diamond’s is trying to be a hard-boiled private detective, and he’s been hired by a troubled millionaire to track down a dead woman who is stalking him.
At twenty I didn’t know anything. About that time I had a Jewish boyfriend named Alain who lived with his parents in a wealthy area of town.... Now Michel Mielnicki, with John Munro, has written Bialystok to Birkenau: The Holocaust Journey of Michel Mielnicki (Ronsdale & Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre).
Magnum Degrees (Phaidon Press) is the enormous book from Magnum, the photographers’ co-operative founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others, in 1947. There are simply too many great photographs here for easy looking: 500 pages of compelling images serve in the end to tire one out.
Rocket Science by Julia Gaunce (Pedlar Press) is a wonderful first novel that should get great notices. Here is a true enactment of a certain Canadian life: Mr. Wicker is the caretaker of the apartment building; Mrs. Wicker attends leather-craft classes; a young Vicki Wicker investigates the world; Peach the grandmother surveys the scene through a hazy screen.
PhotoGraphic Encounters: The Edges and Edginess of Reading Prose Pictures and Visual Fictions (University of Alberta Press and the Kamloops Art Gallery) contains much promise of “edginess” and “subversion,” once the great virtues of the postmodern age (which surely is over by now) and now the empty jargon of art critics. The book is evidence of the great wall dividing the Art World from the world.
