World Literature Today

Shemi Zarhin Some Day Yardenne Greenspan, tr. New Vessel Press Shemi Zarhin’s first novel begins in Tiberias, Israel, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Tiberias becomes a place marked for its passion, family tragedy, and, most of all, its cooking. Following Shlomi, a small boy in love with Ella, his neighbor from Poland, their heartbreaking histories and yet humorous dynamic give the reader insight into the emotional history of Israel in the twentieth century. Meg Vandermerwe Zebra Crossing Oneworld Chipo, an albino Zimbabwean, narrates the experiences she and her brother have as they retreat to Cape Town on the brink of the World Cup. A plot partly organized by her own brother to profit from a gambler’s notions regarding her albinism soon ensnares her. Meg Vandermerwe’s debut novel, Zebra Crossing is a panorama of South African attitudes toward race. Nota Bene Kruk deserves our thanks for making available to a general and even scholarly audience what is effectively a new literary territory for the West. Her authority in the area seems unassailable , and she writes pleasantly (although she does occasionally have trouble with subject-verb agreement). She makes the necessary gender point that “given [that] these stories were composed by men, they clearly reflect male anxieties and desires,” without descending into jargon or contumely. The book is well designed and illustrated , engagingly including the cover of an Egyptian book on Dhāt al-Himma , which “recalls Xena, the warrior princess from the American television series popular in the Middle East in the 1990s,” an instance of Western influence on Arab perception of their popular stories that, in The Arabian Nights, have so formed our imaginations. M. D. Allen University of Wisconsin, Fox Valley Gary Soto. What Poets Are Like: Up and Down with the Writing Life. Seattle. Sasquatch (Random House, distr.). 2013. isbn 9781570618741 With effortlessly honest introspections , acclaimed poet Gary Soto describes the wide-ranging experiences of the writing life in all its extremes. Soto bares his memories— the awards and the rejections, the recognition and the indifference— with grace, like a well-seasoned writer should. Yet he also admits these ups and downs with a sincerity that is increasingly difficult to find in a culture in which people are only interested in sharing their successes . Written in brief episodes, Soto’s reflections invigorate the senses as he confesses to being a flawed human just like the rest of us. And he is satirically funny, even if the fun being had is at his own expense. Soto claims his point of view as that of an aging poet wondering if his best poems are behind him like a well running dry. Soto talks about his worries to remain valued throughout the book, such as in “Oakland Zoo,” wherein Soto counterbalances losing a publisher by appreciating his surroundings: a chimpanzee offers the sullen poet a smile and a glob of fresh snot, and as Soto refuses the kind gesture, he wonders, “Were his feelings hurt? Or was he just teasing me?” While many of these episodes encapsulate bleak moments of every writer’s “writing life,” it is important to see all the beauty, humor, and even peace within this unpredictability , especially as a writer. Soto never purposefully makes the reader feel too uncomfortable. Rather, there is a sense of being one of Soto’s longtime drinking buddies as he speaks to the reader without May–August 2014 • 123 124 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews mediation, allowing himself to yammer on at times about how hard life is as a poet. Interesting tangents outside of Soto’s life occur in episodes such as “Keeping Alive,” when Soto meditates on such hard times as he describes how Gabriel García Márquez ate out of trash cans to survive. In “A Woman Stops Her Car,” Soto tells how he ran away at age seventeen and slept in cars, stole biscuits from churches, and eventually worked at a tire factory. Soto shares these raw personal stories with the reader because he wants to show how a writer is a survivor, too. However, what could be just a cathartic account of traumatic scenes from the inner thoughts of a writer becomes...