October by Zo Wicomb

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reviews the truth in the way that is most beneficial for us.” He believes that numbers are deceptive and bar graphs should be drawn out of inspiration, not data; that employees should come up with work based on their titles; that purposes should be set up for institutes, and not the other way around. When İrdal complains about a talentless baldız (sister-in-law) who wants to sing, Ayarcı insists that they can make her a star; instead of starting with “the abstract concept of music,” İrdal should create a market by lowering people’s standards. See it this way, says Ayarcı: “My baldız wants nothing but to be a successful musician. So I have two factors: my baldız and music. As the first factor cannot be changed, I have no choice but to change the second.” İrdal is grateful for his new wealth and prestige but uneasy with the way his mentor “played with life as if he were playing with a toy he’d picked up somewhere.” Presumably, Tanpınar felt a similar ambivalence toward the top-down program of modernization carried out by the Turkish Republic in the middle of the twentieth century. The Time Regulation Institute may be an allegory for this particular episode of history , but the quest to make sense of modernity—or reveal its absurdity —is an international cause as old as the novel itself, and a cause that Tanpınar has brilliantly advanced. Jacob Daniels New York City Zoë Wicomb. October. New York. The New Press. 2014. isbn 9781595589620 Mercia Murray has been abandoned. Disposed of and dumped by her lover of twenty-four years. She attempts to make sense of a senseless act. After almost a quarter of a century living in Scotland, most of it with Craig, she looks back at her experiences in an attempt to understand them. She is herself a transplant from South Africa—a South Africa she abandoned , disposed of, and dumped in an earlier life. At fifty-two she is called back to South Africa by a letter from her alcoholic brother, Jake. Trying to quiet her broken heart and her dislocated psyche, she goes, only to find herself straddling two worlds and two existences. October is a straightforward depictionofthemultifariouselements in Mercia’s constrained and constrictive life. Although she has been separated from her roots for twenty-five years, supposedly living a “better” life in Scotland, she is haunted by those roots, which begin to reappear, unearthed by the unexpected termination of her relationship with Craig and then the dysfunctional relationship with her brother. She discovers characteristics she had been unaware of in herself and the dark secret of the precedence of her sister-in-law’s son. Zoë Wicomb presents the reader with a contemporary issue—the midlife crisis. In this novel, it is a woman who goes through the crisis , yet it is the behavior of a man, Craig, who precipitates her awakening . Craig, who swore he did not want children, has abandoned Mercia to set up house with a younger woman whom he has impregnated. In South Africa, Mercia, who never wanted children either, is confronted with her brother’s supposed son, Nicky, aged five, and realizes she may have to be responsible for him since his “father,” an alcoholic, is unable to care for him. Mercia’s unraveling world is not only presented at the superficial level of her broken romance but also at the professional level as she gradually realizes how tenuous and fragile that focus has become. The jolt of Craig’s abandonment has tilted her perspective in every direction, and she is unable to find anything sufficiently worthwhile to grab hold of and stabilize herself. She is in a serious quandary—a quandary with which the reader can identify, especially if the reader is over fifty and has either experienced personally, or vicariously, a similar meltdown. 84 worldliteraturetoday.org Linda Leavell Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore Farrar, Straus & Giroux Defying long-held beliefs about prominent modernist poet Marianne Moore, Holding On Upside Down delicately conveys Moore’s passionate yet convoluted personal life and desire for self-agency. Exquisitely written...