World Literature Today

I, awake in their feverish, obsessive 1 delirium. , As translator, Daniel Shapiro 1 faced many challenges, including I abrupt shifts in formal and col 1 loquial diction as well as archaic I uses of Spanish that sent him look , ing to Shakespeare for some of the ' solutions in English. It is likely I that even many Chileans would 1 welcome Shapiro's unobtrusive, I comprehensive notes to these allu 1 sive poems. This book, in short, I has everything the reader needs ] to enter a world illuminated by ? "a forty-watt sun / wrapped in , red cellophane." Ci pango is coming 1 soon to a city near you, unless you I live there already. 1 Steven F,White I St. Lawrence University MISCELLANEOUS John D'Agata. About a Mountain. New York. W.W. Norton. 2010. 236 pages. $23.95. ?sbn978-0-393-06818-4 About a Mountain is about much more than the title suggests. It is about Las Vegas, suicide, the now-discontinued Yucca Moun tain nuclear waste storage facil ity, Edvard Munch, human understanding, and at least a half dozen other things. This book length essay is an idiosyncratically arranged mosaic of information, narrative, and reflection that com bines these seemingly disparate topics in a new and interesting way. The book is structured accord ing to the six w's of reporting: who, what, when, where, why, and how?in that order, fol lowed by a threefold repetition of "why." It begins with a recount ing of the author's participation in Las Vegas's centennial parade, and moves through a tour of the proposed nuclear waste facility, interviews with various scientists and intellectuals, and ends with Munch's The Scream and the events leading up to Levi Presley's fatal leap from theStratosphere Hotel. Throughout the course of the essay, the reader is given a thor ough history of theuse and misuse of science surrounding the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste reposi tory, a concise overview of the politics surrounding its specifica tions, and a chilling sense of the danger inherent in the project. D'Aga ta also shows us an idio syncratic, accurate, and unflatter ing portrait of Las Vegas through the lens of the Stratosphere Hotel, the city's ubiquitous neon signs, and its rarely-spoken-of suicide problem. These two major themes are used as points of entry to an extended reflection on the nature of knowledge and the limits of human understanding. D'Agata's treatment of these big questions is particularly suc cessful because of his strong writ ingand successful stylisticgambits. He shows a reporter's attention to details and numbers while effec tively using them in the service of vivid narratives. His description of theWorst Case Credible Nuclear Transportation Accident is eerily reminiscent of the Toxic Airborne Event inDon DeLillo's White Noise, And, although his splicing togeth er of disparate subjects with no narrative bridging can be jarring, it is usually successful. It slows the reader down and forces him or her to think about the comparison being made. Despite the unusual structure, the work retains a cer tain broad narrative arc that reach es its climax somewhere between D'Aga tawatching Trading Spaces: JOHN D'AGATA Boston while manning a suicide hotline and Munch's walk through Ekeberg Forest in 1883. About a Mountain is ambi tious but readable and difficultbut rewarding. The essay convincingly concludes that Yucca Mountain is not "a solution or a problem" but "where we have come to?a place we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other par cel of land in theworld" yet one that "remains unknown, revealing only the fragilityof our capacity to know." Chris Dearner University ofOklahoma Erica Johnson Debeljak. Forbidden = Bread: A Memoir. Berkeley, California. = North Atlantic (Random House, distr.). E 2009. 288 pages. $15.95. isbn 978-1-| 55643-740-3| Edmund Wilson called F. Scott = Fitzgerald's first novel "a romance E and a reading list." Forbidden Bread E is a romance and a cultural history E inwhich Erica Debeljak works her E way, simultaneously, into a mar- E riage and a new country newly E I May-June 2010 i77 ...