The Giraffe's Neck by Judith Schalansky

Abstract

Jean Echenoz I’m Gone Mark Polizzotti, tr. The New Press Winner of France’s esteemed Prix Goncourt, Jean Echenoz’s I’m Gone follows a struggling art gallery owner who deserts his marriage and career in hopes of making a fortune selling valuable “Paleolithic art.” Bursting with comical prose and insistent on subverting clichéd literary conventions, this fast-moving and unpredictable novel offers a satiric contemplation of contemporary art, lust, and adventure. Jérémie Dres We Won’t See Auschwitz Edward Gauvin, tr. SelfMadeHero On a quest to connect with their family’s combined Jewish-Polish heritage, the author and his brother traverse through Poland. Their conscious decision to bypass Auschwitz leads them to explore Żelechów and Warsaw before landing in Europe’s largest celebration of Jewish culture in Kraków. This graphic novel documents the power of dialogue with one’s ancestry. Nota Bene for Alexandre Taillard de Vorms, the French foreign minister and a standin for Dominique de Villepin. Arthur is drawn with a very similar Gallic nose to that of the minister, and, in their first face-off—where Arthur says almost nothing and the minister does all the talking—their similarities are strikingly illustrated. After all, Arthur will become the source of everything that comes out of de Vorms’s mouth. Once de Vorms gives Arthur the job, the devastating satire toward the workings of the department begins. Underlings jockey for position with the minister, and each defends his or her right to be the last word on the Middle East or Africa or the US. Little thought is given to the larger picture when these advisors indulge their internal struggles for power and notice. The one noble character, drawn with less caricatured style, is the chief of staff, Claude Maupas, seemingly the only sane head at the Quai d’Orsay. His biggest job is keeping the voluble and not always clearheaded minister out of trouble. Arthur, as the writer, is the perfect lens through which to view the minister’s double-speak, his inability to resist a rhetorical phrase that says nothing, and his penchant for quoting such sages as Heraclitus, Marx, Rousseau, and Voltaire out of context and to sidesplitting effect. De Vorms is also unable to tone down his colossal ego, even when vying with the American secretary of state, a very familiar African American here named Jeffrey Cole. Of course, there is no disguise, not even a name change, when we see President Bush take the stage. You don’t have to be a fan of the contemporary satirist Armando Ianucci or his American TV program Veep to appreciate the ways in which Lanzac and his perfect illustrator, Christophe Blain, lampoon ridiculous and familiar characters. But Weapons of Mass Diplomacy has an even sharper sting than these contemporary counterparts. Lanzac and Blain bring to mind Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Their characters ’ vanities and foibles underscore just how dangerous and at times foolish are the people to whom we entrust not only our well-being but our future. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Judith Schalansky. The Giraffe’s Neck. Shaun Whiteside, tr. New York. Bloomsbury. 2014. isbn 9781620403389 Inge Lohmark teaches biology at a “gymnasium” in a backwater town in the remotest former East Germany, which, even more than most of rural Germany, is hemorrhaging population. Most are moving to chic Berlin while her own daughter, years ago, settled in California. As Inge sees the weeds grow in the deserted streets, she envisions the area eventually returned to a state of nature, completely overrun September–October 2014 • 79 reviews with plant life. These will indeed be “blooming landscapes,” but hardly the ones then-chancellor Helmut Kohl promised the easterners if they voted for his unification plan. While she preaches evolution— “adaptation is everything”—this is the exact opposite of what she does: she does not believe education will do much for her ninth-graders. For her, biology is destiny, the “true dictatorship ,” which neither the previous dictatorship nor the current democracy could alter. This is a dictatorship in which there is no room for feelings—if a girl in her class is being bullied by the others...