Our Man in Iraq
2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2013.0049
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Resumo62 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Museum in Zurich), the boundaries between real and imagined spaces, interior and exterior (or fabricated and fabulated) landscapes—in brief, between topos and logos—are often blurred, if not erased, and their correspondences and liminal ambiguities are consistently cross-referenced throughout the book. Similarly, the grammatical person and gender of the anonymous traveler change from movement to movement, yet remain expressions of the same sensible and reflective self. In what is probably one of the richest and most complex sections of the book, the second movement (“Forest”) combines a brief account of Wagner’s momentous stay at Villa Schönberg; a meditation on the contrast between the world of day and the realm of night—in Tristan und Isolde as well as in Krishna paintings; a visit to the Rietberg Museum to view a collection of Pahari miniature paintings; a fictionalized account of a painter’s life and legacy; and a mysterious encounter between the traveler and a young girl who guides him through a landscape that is, at one time, Indian and Wagnerian: miniaturistic and immensurable, mythical and immanent, sacred and profane. Such a tour de force is accomplished through Mohanty’s peculiar form of prose poetry, a rich and eloquent descant that alternates description, reflection, and speculation and is punctuated by symbolic images and allegorical figures that recur, with increasing complexity of meaning, throughout her work: trees like the gulmohar, birds like the koel and the crow, fish, elements (water in particular), certain colors, garments (the dupatta, the sari), and—perhaps the most powerful and iconic of them all—a solitary boatman. In Book One, he rows singing an ancient river song that is neither about love nor pain but leaves both behind; in New Life, he prompts the protagonist’s decision to end her American life and return to India; and in Five Movements , he ferries a man who is not yet, but will be, the narrator’s father across a river as wide as a sea. She has never seen this river since this is “not a memory, it never happened. It is a refraction of that which did”— which of course is what literature and art are all about, and especially what literature as art will strive for, as Mohanty knows and does so well. Graziano Krätli North Haven, Connecticut Robert Perisic. Our Man in Iraq. Will Firth, tr. New York. Black Balloon. 2013. isbn 978936787050 This postmodern, postcommunist picaresque hilariously skewers Croatian , Western, and global culture as it follows the rapid descent of quasi-journalist Toni, a country kid striving to make it in the big city. Desperate to secure his position, Toni hires his “crazy” cousin Boris to cover the Iraq War. As personal disaster looms, Toni ponders Croatia ’s emerging capitalist democracy, Yugoslavia’s demise, the madness of war, the power of capitalism, and the American Dream. The text unfolds through Boris’s emails to Toni and Toni’s first-person narration. Having suffered PTSD while soldiering in Bosnia, Boris lacks journalistic training. Yet his ramblings , which Toni secretly rewrites for publication, capture war’s essential surreality, as when he notes that Baghdad is awash in Coca-Cola, “as if Coke is sponsoring the whole rally.” Toni, meanwhile, anatomizes the new Croatia, shaped by “the shock troops of happiness,” whose youth embrace slow food, Nick Cave, and cocaine. Throughout, words linked to “acting” and “game” underscore the fluid identities conferred by global high capitalism. Toni’s girlfriend, Sanja, stars in Daughter Courage, an erotic bastardization of Brecht’s seminal work, the novel’s subtext. According to Toni, acting is “the paradigm of our age,” and socialism collapsed because it offered fewer “masks, subcultures , or . . . films” than democracy. In westernized Zagreb, Toni plays the “suave European intellectual” among Croats who, “new at the game” of democracy and capitalism, yearn “the Eastern European post-communist version of the American dream.” When Milka, Boris’s mother, sparks a media frenzy by trumpeting her son’s disappearance, Toni’s boss makes him invent emails and impersonate his cousin: forced to acquire a Antonio Garrido The Corpse Reader Thomas Bunstead, tr. Amazon Crossing Tragedy hits thirteenth-century scholarinvestigator Ci Song, who is...
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