A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape

Abstract

passion strives to persevere. Perhaps the fiery and sporadic nature of his mother’s condition is what makes this work most harrowing, as Lalla Fatma’s moments of liveliness bring forth a momentary hope within the shadow of inevitability. Due to this, the work can at times seem emotionally taxing. However, this is yet another necessary facet of Jelloun’s realism. Despite its morbid subject matter, About My Mother pulses with life, invigorating the reader with every sentence. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Matt Donovan. A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape. San Antonio, Texas. Trinity University Press. 2016. 253 pages. There is a huge arc that links the first incomparable essay (on the atom-bomb crater at Trinity, New Mexico) to the final expansive one about the Pantheon in Rome, and this arc culminates in a massively bracing negative capability. Matt Donovan’s expansive erudition over fourteen meditations on ruin and redemption is never deadening: everything from painting, architecture, engineering, sculpture , photography, film, literature, music, geography, history, and mythology seems to be embraced in large loops. An ancient mosaic in Pompeii stirs him to remember Keats; Tuscany evokes Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Rothko, Masaccio, and, more intriguingly, a haiku by Issa; and in the final essay, Donovan gathers together Caravaggio , Dante, George Herbert, Marguerite Yourcenar, Brueghel, Walter Benjamin, the Psalms, Pope Alexander VII, Mussolini, and Elizabeth Bishop. Not every essay is a masterpiece or even substantial enough, but even the slightest ones (such as one on Japanese cherry blossoms and a banal haiku) emphasize his humanist perspective. In “Garden of the Fugitive,” Donovan confesses to feeling nothing about the body casts of the perished in Pompeii because poignancy is ruptured through replication and there is little of the human to be found in the human-shaped hollows. At his best, Donovan writes almost poetically as he combines personal experience with dream symbolism, history with metaphysical inquiry. That kid in an Ohio night who aimed a flashlight straight at a star-clustered sky, and who mused on his “clipped beams soaring off into blackness , cruising the cosmos, bound to strike something decades on” has become a Lannan Fellow acutely concerned about “the conspicuous absence” of what is human in World Literature in Review 92 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 history. As he parses through ruin, “looking for things rich and strange,” he admits that he rarely knows what he is looking for. Even when he discovers certain verities, he interrogates himself, wondering how much certainty he wants in what he seeks. Keith Garebian Mississauga, Canada Cynthia Ozick. Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2016. 211 pages. This slender but dazzling collection of thirteen essays, some previously published but refurbished, is primarily concerned with fiction and criticism, both of which Cynthia Ozick practices with ease. It is clear that she is not a reviewer but a critic. Reviewers are allocated a certain amount of space, while critics can—or should—be given free rein, addressing not just the work but its relationship to the world in which it gestated and into which it arrived. Naturally, such critics are rare. Most can synopsize and summarize, but not all can judge, the root meaning of “critic ”—one who can adjudicate, producing something akin to literature. Ozick asks as much of critics as Alexander Pope did in “An Essay on Criticism,” who demanded “a knowledge both of books and humankind.” Ozick is very much the kind of critic Pope envisioned. The epigraph is taken from Pope’s essay, and the title was suggested by Pope’s challenge to critics, urging them to attack the excesses of the age: “These monsters, Critics! with your darts engage, / Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage!” Two such critics who can satisfy Ozick’s criteria are the polymath Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, who based his criticism on moral as well as aesthetic grounds. To Ozick, the ability to wield language creatively, even in letter writing, is paramount . She praises Saul Bellow’s letters both for their expression and insights. The prose may not be as inventive as that of the novels, but the letters are a worthy ancilla. Ozick has never considered the Holocaust...