Death Sentences

Abstract

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 61 Delisle’s detached observations and carefully metered visual narrative is a book that allows the reader to explore the territory without the ideological baggage often tagging along with a story like this. Delisle is not ignorant to the suffering that confronts him on his stay, but he presents it through an apolitical filter that sees it as a human problem rather than an ethnic or political one. The graphic novel is certainly no stranger to the autobiography or the travelogue. In Guy Delisle, though, we have an exceptional creator who has delivered a stylistically consistent and topically timely body of work in under a decade. They constitute a major contribution to the body of vital graphic novels being published to a global audience right now. Jerusalem, the latest limb to spring from that corpus, is as close to a must-read work as any enthusiast of world graphic literature is likely to find this year. Rob Vollmar University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Kawamata Chiaki. Death Sentences. Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens , tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. isbn 9780816654550 Paris, 1948. In local cafés, surrealists “ruined by the war” gather regularly around visionary guru André Breton . On this afternoon, in the Café Blanche, Breton awaits young FrenchChinese poet Hu Mei, whom he first met five years earlier while an exile in New York. Then Hu Mei sought Breton’s “diagnosis” of his first prose poem, “Another World,” which Breton found obsessively seductive. When Hu Mei gives Breton “The Gold of Time,” reading it will ultimately prove fatal. But first, Breton will unwittingly enable the poem to go viral, ultimately to precipitate death on an apocalyptic scale. Lethal literature is a common conceit in the fantastic: the eponymous sanity-destroying play in Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895), the Necronomicon and other eldritch tomes in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. But in Death Sentences, Kawamata Chiaki is up to something more subtle. The fate of those who suffer the narcotic experience of Hu Mei’s poem raises issues both metaphysical and ontological. For while the reading kills the body, it does something quite different to the soul. Written in the style of a fastpaced airport novel, Death Sentences surprises with its originality and conceptual depth. For within this thriller about a plague of poetry lurk lacerating critiques of corporate militarism , of the capitalist conception of culture as commodity, and of the complicity of artists in what William S. Burroughs called “the control machine,” the mechanisms whereby power structures use language to create the “reality studio” in which we “marks” unwittingly live and serve. Kawamata has been publishing fiction, criticism, and nonfiction since 1972. Death Sentences, his sixteenth novel, was published (as Genshi -gari) in 1984, promptly became a best-seller, and won the Nihon SF Taisho Award, the grand prize of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. Subsequently, he turned primarily to military fiction, both historical and science fictional. Kawamata grounds the early section of Death Sentences, set among Lutz Bassmann We Monks and Soldiers Jordan Stump, tr. University of Nebraska Press Dark and visceral, this collection of stories chronicles the declining days of humanity and the often-futile attempts to assist those in their last moments. We Monks and Soldiers is an inventive and poetic expression of the inevitability of total destruction (see WLT, Sept. 2008, 64). Kevin Barry City of Bohane Graywolf Press It’s 2053, and the city of Bohane has long been in decline due to gang violence and tribal division. Under the control of gangster Logan Hartnett, a new threat appears in the city when his nemesis returns. Hartnett also finds trouble at home with his wife in this tale that intertwines past, present, and future. Nota Bene 62 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews the surrealists in New York and Paris, in fact. He brings to vivid life Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, and others, and even takes the title of Hu Mei’s killer poem from a key phrase in Breton’s The Surrealist Manifesto (1924), later inscribed in the epitaph on his tombstone: “I seek the gold of time.” Were the...