Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship by Sarah Ruhl Max Ritvo

Abstract

Aira turns that story into one about a writer of commercial gothic novels who, aware of his work’s puerility, stops writing . He spends his time consuming opium, delivered by a dealer adamant to stay in the narrator’s house indefinitely. Meanwhile, his ghostwriters have become a criminal Buenos Aires gang that acts according to standard gothic tales they had written before (in interviews Aira states he has read every gothic story). Within that story there are quibbles and pontifications about what literature is or what a writer does and of course about the avant-garde as a kind of sabotage. Humor, along the lines of Buster Keaton and Monty Python during a bus trip across central Buenos Aires with a stranger named Alicia (following a real route that Aira takes), and sensuality are not absent from those digressions ; nor is the sense that Aira is going somewhere by going nowhere, since after all he is contributing to the commercialization of other conventions. If “it’s complicated” could summarize Aira’s writing, Prins is a magnificent reappraisal of what he is up to now aesthetically, which is summarized in the last sentence as creating worlds in which reality has little to do with what he has called “dreamlike realism” and more with a novelist’s efforts to preserve his genius in a world that can know everything. Will H. Corral Madrid, Spain Tsitsi Dangarembga This Mournable Body Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2018. 284 pages. This Mournable Body continues the narrative of Tambudzai, the protagonist from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed novel Nervous Conditions. This Mournable Body engages strongly with the politics, economics, and culture of Zimbabwe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries while highlighting the lives and trials of its women. The title of the novel references “Unmournable Bodies,” Teju Cole’s 2015 essay for the New Yorker. The “unmournable bodies” in Cole’s essay are military combatants and civilians whose deaths are “not meaningful” to westerners for a number of reasons. Dangarembga turns the phrase on its head by drawing attention to a body’s righttobemournedregardlessofideological convictions. The novel focuses particularly on women’s bodies, which suffer a tremendous amount of physical and emotional Books in Review Sarah Ruhl & Max Ritvo Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 336 pages. THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK of letters, accomplished playwright Sarah Ruhl reminds us that her friend and student, Max Ritvo, wanted to be remembered for his poems. But during a reading for Poetry magazine in July 2016, Ritvo himself admitted that “the poems only make sense in part because they were written by a dying twentyfive -year-old.” Whether or not readers are familiar with these circumstances before picking up Letters from Max, we learn early on that the entire book is underpinned by a very particular kind of urgency. The fact of Ritvo’s illness (a years-long struggle with Ewing’s sarcoma), while never foregrounded in the vivid and uncanny poetry throughout these letters, sets the stage for a beautiful, grounded, and intensely abbreviated search for meaning. I, too, spent much of adolescence teetering and pumped full of poison. I was concerned in writing this review that my intimate knowledge of adolescent cancer might somehow cloud my ability to portray the book in its own, unaltered light. My error was in assuming that any light is unaltered by those that stand within it, and the readers of this book are invited in early and repeatedly. It’s as if both Ruhl and Ritvo understood too well the urgent pull and hesitation that comes with being a part of such intensity. Early on, the conversations begin to shift and refract at speeds that assume deep familiarity and a radical level of trust. Even in moments when a reader less well versed in Hume and Wittgenstein might get lost, we’re carried by the buoyancy and excitement for language and life that these authors shared; a remarkable sense that we’ve been invited into some shaking, jeweled center: “You complimented my ear. Nobody ever compliments my ear. Secretly, I am very proud of my ear. Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself...