Camanchaca by Megan McDowell

Abstract

Daoud never loses his poet’s eye and his noble heart. This early-twentieth-century Werther meets three key people: Russian adventurer and cartographer Berensky, who gives him his first balloon ride and his New York address; circus trapeze artist Nora, whose love lures him to Palermo; and Elena, an Italian immigrant to the United States. Woven among these pleasant awakening moments are the nadirs of repeated discrimination against him on grounds of his Arab identity, the arrest of his close friends, his father’s hostility toward him and financial ruin, and his baptism by fire as a US soldier at the Battle of Château-Thierry in July 1918. The novel’s primary plot covers barely a few weeks. This unified time/space is narrated in one-page dramatic vignettes. Like a rhizome, the plot sprouts longer secondary stories focusing on the four women in Daoud’s life: his mother, the proud Zoulikha, from whom he inherited his independent streak; his nanny, the faithful Mouldia, sold as a child on the slave market, who mothered him and taught him loyalty; his first love, the Arab-Italian trapeze artist Nora, with whom he shared self-respect; and his wife, Sicilian-born widow Elena, whose dignity and independence he instantly recognized. Altogether, the fifty-five untitled units/chapters that alternate between rhizome and secondary stories create an arresting phenomenology of dying. Daoud discovers the “civilized” world with the innocence of Robinson Crusoe discovering the “natural” world. His primary mode of exploration is a series of endless walks through cities and landscapes . We discover the diversity, colorfulness , and cosmopolitanism of Mediterranean cultures from the Maghreb to the Levant. This world teeming with explorers and adventurers, invasions and riots, contrasts with the uniform, gray, and busy northern industrial world. Trains, boats, airplanes, and the machinery of war are grim reminders that the birth of modernity was also the death of an epoch. Like many novels recently penned by North African writers, Tunisian Yankee revisits the awakening of national pride and its brutal repression. With great finesse, OumhanirelatestheTunisianscenebetween 1906 and 1911 to similar events taking place from Syria to Morocco at the hands of the French, Italian, and Ottoman authorities. Furthermore, she reveals the peoples’ shared experiences, blood ties, and political solidarity . Against this rich tapestry, she notes dates and events as passing references that help anchor the story in time and space without obscuring the characters. Her flexible language and visual sensibility create unforgettable paintings in words. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Diego Zúñiga. Camanchaca. Trans. Megan McDowell. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2017. 110 pages. Camanchaca is a thick fog often seen along certain parts of the Chilean coast. Pushed along by the winds coming off the Pacific Ocean, it often appears at night, covering the road in a thick, hazy layer. The camanchaca keeps you from seeing clearly, it is dangerous, it makes the landscape blurred, and it demands attention and caution, much like the novel by Diego Zúñiga that borrows its name. The story is narrated in brief fragments in which synthesis, brevity, and poetics characterize the remarkable debut novel of this young Chilean narrator. Camanchaca is a road novel along the lines of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it is narrated with an intimacy and minimalism more reminiscent of the best work of Alejandro Zambra. A father and son set off on a journey from Santiago, Chile, to Tacna, Peru, to visit a cheap dentist who can help fix the boy’s teeth. The protagonist, a child Gisela Heffes Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities Literal A wealth of dizzying ideas emerges from this tiny book (presented by the author in both Spanish and English) as Heffes plays storyteller, philosopher, and provocateur in her quest to entertain and edify her audience. Walking a thin and blurry line between apocalypse and fairy tale, Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities is a book that both defies classification and demands multiple reads to appreciate its many facets. Jérôme Ferrari The Principle Trans. Howard Curtis Europa Editions Parisian writer Jérôme Ferrari plunges us into the world of Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner...