World Literature Today

reviews The narrator, at times omniscient , seems to occasionally whisper secrets so that readers can understand the novel, which toward the end serves to weaken the novel’s structure and render its omniscience irrelevant. It is safe to assume that two earlier writing traditions underlie Alarcón’s work: ethnographic journalism (United States) and political pedagogy (Latin America), which, given his biographical trajectory, are perfectly plausible. Both writing fashions cross one another, disrupting flow, and in the best moments function as fortunate forces that become a heritage for interpretation. In At Night We Walk in Circles, that junction rarely comes to fruition , particularly when Henry’s ulterior motive for the revival is intertwined with the memories of his cell mate and lover, Rogelio. Rewarding Alarcón for presenting Peru’s recent history ethnographically and pedagogically says more about the awarding institutions that legitimate his work than about the real space it occupies within the greater achievements of Latin American or United States literatures. Ultimately, this novel does not sparkle on its own merits, but it does bring to the fore the problem of simultaneity in literature: a text that appears to discover Peru with amazement and compassion, almost with the innocence of early anthropology, written as if other Peruvian writers like Arguedas, Vargas Llosa, Thays, and others had not started or surpassed different traditions. At best, At Night We Walk in Circles is an instructive lesson about Peru during the last twenty years; at worst, it is a novel of intolerable naïveté and didacticism. Antonio Villarruel Universidad Internacional SEK Ecuador Alessandro Baricco. Mr. Gwyn. Ann Goldstein, tr. San Francisco. McSweeney’s Books. 2014. isbn 9781938073960 There are two novellas in this volume , either of which might easily stand on its own. Yet they complement each other in canny, productive ways; and each interrogates the other, though not all of the questions they ask are answered. The first text, far longer than the second, lends its title to the volume as a whole. It puts on stage Jasper Gwyn, a forty-something British writer who, in the dozen years he has practiced his profession, has achieved both popular and critical acclaim. Despite that success, a feeling of emptiness has taken hold of him, prompting him to vow publicly never to produce another book. Yet he finds that he misses writing, and most particularly its small gestures, its rhythms, the way it plays out in time. He imagines that he might be happy as a copyist, but with a twist: he will copy people rather than texts, as a portraitist might, but with words instead of paint. Launching out on that new occupation, he enters into conversation with people both quick and dead—and in some cases the latter conversations are considerably more developed than the former. The second novella is entitled Three Times at Dawn, and it is just possible that its author is Jasper Gwyn, under another name. Its three brief parts entertain relations with one another that are much like the ones the novella as a whole entertains with the one that precedes it: they address each other elliptically and obliquely, in a dialogue that might best be described as mannerist in character. As Baricco sketches them, people are fundamentally narrative beings; that is, their essence resides in their story. Just as stories tend to ramify, so, too, do people. In that perspective, it is not surprising that some characters should seem to wander between the three parts of this novella, appearing briefly here, then there. The same is broadly true of certain other effects, whether thematic or formal, as if a pattern of rhyme were at work here. Alessandro Baricco limns these narrative connections with a great deal of mastery and a very delicate sense of 74 worldliteraturetoday.org Joséphine Bacon Message Sticks / Tshissinuatshitakana Phyllis Aronoff, tr. TSAR Message Sticks provides a rare and welcome glimpse into the Innu-aimun language and way of life through the poetry of Joséphine Bacon. She says, “We are a people of oral tradition. Today we can write. Poetry lets us bring the language of the nutshimit, our land, back to life, and through the words, the sound of...