Pascale QuivigerIf You Hear Me by Lazer Lederhendler

Abstract

Every Riven Thing’s “Lord Is Not a Word” (“you did not know / you knew”), thus voiding them of their meaning. Here, in “A Sketch,” there are “Derringer words” one “hardly needs to use, to use.” With regard to the related content, Wiman will underline the materiality of the brain and mind that, to him, marvelously , enhance the wonder of faith—however delicate it might be—like in “To Grasp at the Mercury Minnows Are” and here in “Spirits.” What is new, however, is that this slim book of poems reads as if it were the husk of a magnificent novel. This is partly the effect of Wiman’s style, which has deepened—allowing for some of the lighter touches that admirers of his memoirs will recognize. Furthermore, it is achieved structurally through the gravity of the long central poem “Parable of a Perfect Silence,” which in turn engages the rest of the book. Wiman accomplishes a single narrative arc through the idiosyncrasies of a poetry that will always honor the word over the message. That word is mortal, its survival a style. Arthur Willemse University of Maastricht Pascale Quiviger If You Hear Me Trans. Lazer Lederhendler. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 342 pages. ONE OF PASCALE Quiviger’s narrators calls “love” a “hole punched in reality”; though from an earlier novel, it aptly describes the situation in If You Hear Me. David falls from the scaffolding on a Montreal construction site and enters a comatose state. His wife, young son, and parents “gather around an emptiness, a family shaped like a donut.” Quiviger captures the hospital perfectly : “its incomprehensible blend of cordiality and coldness, humanity and protocol.” The space between extremes is meaningful. Caroline’s memories of her husband are simultaneously “too far away, too close”: “Touch him, don’t touch him.” David is “inexplicable, a husband neither dead nor alive.” But he is also “both mysterious and unchanging .” Borders between similar states are also explored: dormancy and recovery; living and surviving; “necessary support ” and “unreasonable obstinacy.” The narrative accommodates its characters’ changing responses to David’s new reality. Chapter headings are units of time; minutes and hours are initially important, but the nomenclature adjusts to reflect developments. For some, “hours dissolve”; for others, it’s an “endless dawn.” Irony proliferates : David worked in construction but now seems to disintegrate, and preferred foods are identified by the floor’s vending machine codes even while numerical expressions of time become meaningless. Simple language and structure suit this complex subject, along with Quiviger’s attention to detail. An apartment building ’s individual floors are each identified by different smells, for instance, just as each character’s engagement with David’s circumstances is unique, depending on whether or how they consider the possibilities surrounding levels of consciousness . Readers can choose to dwell in “curry, bleach, fried food, raspberry shower gel, overripe trashcans,” in “invisible worlds, Books in Review Garous Abdolmalekian Lean against This Late Hour Trans. Ahmad Nadalizadeh & Idra Novey. New York. Penguin. 2020. 160 pages. DESPITE DISPARITIES IN time, space, and language, even in translation, Baudelaire ’s address to the reader (“—Hypocrite reader,—My duplicate—My brother!”) has a particular way of feeling personal, as though it is you, the embodied reader, and not a general, undefined public, who is implicated in the hypocrisies that the speaker has in mind. The address is direct, to be sure, but, perhaps more interestingly, it also creates a sense of immediacy because it is delivered in such an obviously affected stage voice. That is to say, it is easy to locate yourself in Baudelaire’s hypocrite reader in large part because the poetic voice resists a literal, autobiographical reading. You assume that the real person named Charles Baudelaire did not in fact experience “the deadly poison , daggers . . . Monsters screaming” and so on that are so vividly invoked. Rather, the use of stage voice, the overt and deliberate dissociation of the poetic “I” from the historically occurring individual who composed the words or, for that matter, the dissociation of “you” from anyone in that poet’s personal life, opens a possibility for a different kind of correspondence between the reader and the text. If you see traces...