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God's Horse and The Atheists' School

2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2013.0284

1945-8134

Alice-Catherine Carls,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

Alessandro Barbero The Eyes of Venice Gregory Conti, tr. Europa Editions The characters in The Eyes of Venice come to vibrant life in this energetic adventure story set in sixteenth-century Venice and the surrounding Mediterranean. The author is a well-known scholar of medieval history who teaches at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Vercelli, Italy. Ama Ata Aidoo Diplomatic Pounds and Other Stories Ayebia Clarke Ghanaian author, playwright, and poet Ama Ata Aidoo continues her exploration of the tensions inherent in relationships, gender politics, sex, family, children, and academia. The contrasts that Aidoo points out between traditional society and an educated, well-to-do professional class are tempered by humor and inspired storytelling. march–april 2013 • 139 Nota Bene the stories embodies and performs them. The border between English and Spanish becomes blurred, and so we find phrases like “guapísima as Hell” and words like the hispanicized abstract noun “beserkería.” There is an addictive musicality to the language throughout the collection, with its combination of consonantheavy Germanic monosyllables and the open vowels of Spanish: “cállate la fucking boca.” What makes this code-switching so compelling is how naturally it fits within the single narrative voice. “It takes so much more energy keeping these things apart,” Díaz says in one interview. This is the great thing about This Is How You Lose Her: here is genuine linguistic innovation that is unpretentious and alive, and the resulting stories are funny, brilliantly observed, and devastatingly real. Annie McDermott Mexico City Wilhelm Dichter. God’s Horse and The Atheists’ School. Madeline G. Levine, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2012. isbn 9780810127937 After a distinguished career as a ballistics and algorithms patent holder, Wilhelm Dichter started writing. In his work of the past twenty years, he not only realized his childhood dream but also overcame the Holocaust ’s legacy of death and suffering . The two autobiographical novels under review, God’s Horse and The Atheists’ School, resonate with each other. The central part of this narrative is the portrait of a little boy hidden in attics, inside wells, and under beds, barely surviving war on the run. An imaginative little boy filled with a complex and precocious inner life, and gifted with phenomenal observation powers, who finds solace in books and pictures. A little boy with thick glasses and achy knees, who gives his brand-new soccer ball to street chums and watches their game from the sidewalk. A normal little boy whose looks, clumsiness, and absentmindedness in normal circumstances would make him a punching bag, but whose sufferings are defined by wartime and postwar Poland’s anti-Semitism. A little boy who learns a healthy skepticism toward reality and is able to silence his needs and complaints. Told in a dispassionate tone, his story creates perspective and space to appreciate the full span of the child’s emotions. At school, Dichter becomes known for his drawings of “little people ”—his heroes, Pan Tadeusz, Sienkiewicz ’s hussars, the Punic Wars, post-German military magazines, and David Copperfield—defenders or avengers, surrogate, recyclable family helping to right wrongs and conjure fear. This re-created safety net enables the child to keep his balance in a deranged universe. Balance is usually achieved through incremental positioning—in Dichter’s narrative, the segments of his experience are brief, disconnected elements separated by blank spaces. The result is a transcendental story. To use another image, Dichter choreographs a theater of shadows, casting himself partly in the light and partly in the shadow in order to partake of life and commune with the dead. The outer world presented by Dichter is strikingly insightful and accurate. Not unlike other displaced or persecuted children, he spends a great deal of time describing humble 140 World Literature Today reviews objects that sustain soul and body, namely books, food, and memories. The adults around him recite poetry , speak German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, English, and French. They represent the encounter between the Orthodox Galician Jewish world and the sophisticated, assimilated world of Austrian Jews whom the Holocaust trapped in the East. In 1945, communist Poland is a world in “ruins, rags, and lies.” We get a crash course in...