Born Again Skeptic and Other Valedictions by Robert Murray Davis

Abstract

he “understood that the only revenge, the only memento, and also the only possibility to forget and to forgive consisted in telling what happened, and nothing more.” It was some twenty years before Abad was able to write this memoir. The key to the memoir’s triumph is Abad’s deft handling of memory. The paramilitary’s violence succeeds and soccer continues to serve as “the opiate of the people,” the work suggests, because memory or the act of remembering does not occupy a higher plane than it currently does. That is why the right wing held society hostage in the 1960s (when the author was a child) and repeated its exercise in the 1980s without massive resistance. The work’s title, Oblivion, is best captured by Mejía Vallejo’s speech at the father’s funeral: “We live in a county that forgets its best faces, its best impulses, and so life will go on. . . .” Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Robert Murray Davis. Born Again Skeptic and Other Valedictions. Norman,Oklahoma.MongrelEmpire. 2011. isbn 9780983305248 Robert Murray Davis’s collection of personal essays, Born Again Skeptic and Other Valedictions, opens with a piece titled “Is This an Autobiography ?” The short answer to that question is yes—the essays are for the most part autobiographical. However, the threads woven through the book tell far more than just one man’s experiences; they offer insight into the American condition: the arc of our recent, collective history as well as the trajectory of an individual life. Davis, who taught English at the University of Oklahoma for thirtyplus years, covers an array of topics ranging from memories of his parents to his ambivalent relationship with Catholic theology to literature, books, and academia. Sociopolitical issues and broken relationships are also frequent—and sometimes parallel —subjects. These are not personal essays bursting forth from (mis)adventures, as in the vein of David Foster Wallace ’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” but they do provide a glimpse into man-and-moment in a similar fashion. In “Borders,” Davis employs a dark humor to discuss the demographics of Sun Lakes, a community for “mature adults” where he has retired in the rogue state of Arizona . Bordering the Gila River Indian Community, Sun Lakes is divided into sections that seem based on class—in various senses of the word. One resident tells him, “You might be able to find a woman in Phase I who lives the way you do. My new cleaning woman lives in Phase I. She’s sleeping with my yard man.” The Phoenix -area borders Davis addresses are both geopolitical and psychological, and he sees a sad state of affairs in Arizona and beyond: “As long as we are mobile, we are less bound by geography and environment, believing more or less unconsciously like Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa that when a country is used up, we can move to another one.” While many of the essays in Born Again Skeptic balance humor and charm with memory and critical analysis, some are much more serious in tone. For example, “Dry & High” is the literally sobering tale of Davis’s abrupt, cold-turkey end to his Esther Tusquets Seven Views of the Same Landscape Barbara F. Ichiishi, tr. Host Seven Views consists of a series of delicately rendered vignettes set in postwar Barcelona, each told from the perspective of a young girl whose family belongs to the Catalan upper-middle class. All the joys, sorrows, and discoveries of coming-of-age are brought to life in the author’s lyrical prose. Jean-Philippe Toussaint Reticence John Lambert, tr. Dalkey Archive What starts as a simple vacation to visit a friend soon leads to a mystery involving a missing person and the strange appearance of a dead black cat. The narrator describes his search for truth while curbing his growing sense of paranoia. Belgian author Toussaint is the author of nine other novels. july – august 2012 75 Nota Bene 76 World Literature Today reviews drinking—an act that appears at first to be entirely for the good but which turns out to be the trigger for an avalanche of hard times...