Eugene Eoyang The Promise and Premise of Creativity Continuum Subtitled “Why Comparative Literature Matters,” this volume from an esteemed literary scholar makes the case for reading and studying literature at a critical moment. Through case studies and well-reasoned arguments, Eoyang upholds literature as cultural communication and outlines “the uses of the useless.” He tackles an important subject with enthusiasm and demonstrates his own heartfelt affection for comparative literature. Suzanne Dracius Climb to the Sky Jamie Davis, tr. University of Virginia Press In this collection of eight stories and one novella, Suzanne Dracius places women in opposition to overwhelming historical and existential circumstances. Her protagonists face the varied traumas of the Caribbean twentieth century—from the eruption of Mount Pelée to the boredom of bourgeois living—and must learn to overcome. Jamie Davis is an experienced translator of Dracius’s prose. Nota Bene The ten-year range of markers begins each chapter, with the focal year for the chapter in boldface. This aid is quite helpful in a novel that alternates between the present and the past, chapter by chapter. Centering on the characters’ stories and their attempts to cope with an unstable political/military situation , Marra keeps the style straightforward and informative. The texture of their experience comes primarily from character interchanges, in which people who are, in a sense, always under siege manage to keep their spirits up as well as their dedication to humane values, even when they don’t realize it. Their hard-bitten exchanges are often surprisingly funny and sometimes even tender. The secondary characters are quite strong, even memorable: an old man who burns his life’s work, a history of Chechnya; his son, whose torture by the Russians turns him into an informer; the surgeon’s sister, who is made an addict and sex slave, but comes back to paint a mural and work in the hospital —and then disappears again. Some readers may be disappointed that political history is slighted, that there is not more on the religious fervor of the Chechen rebels. But the novel reminds us that such wars entangle many who are not impelled to fight and want nothing more than a return to something approaching normalcy. Marra’s constellation of characters , revealed from inside through changes in point of view, show us “life,” which is, after all, the word defined by the title, according to a Russian medical dictionary. These people will stay with you. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Sharmistha Mohanty. Five Movements in Praise. Mumbai. Almost Island. 2013. isbn 9788192129518 In three books published over a period of eighteen years, Sharmistha Mohanty has been showing, with increasing consistency and verve, that there is more to contemporary creative writing in India than the marketable mix of magic realism, hip journalism, and re-creative nonfiction revered by most publishers and media outlets. There is poetry, of course, of which Mohanty is a perceptive publisher; but there are also rare instances of literary fiction and creative nonfiction whose models are to be found outside the mainstream of the Anglo-American novelistic and short-story tradition, in the wilder woods of continental Europe’s and Latin American’s para- and metafictional practices. While building on the foundations painstakingly laid in Book One (1995) and New Life (2005), Five Movements in Praise pursues a more ambitious course, moving beyond the internal waters of confessional, coming-of-age narrative, and aiming at the open sea of experimental literature. Using a musical metaphor as a compositional scheme and the travelogue form (and the traveler persona, or personae) as a narrative decoy, Mohanty successfully overcomes the autobiographical impulse and the limitations of the first-person narrative that had characterized her previous works. Although each of the five movements is set in actual places (Khuldabad and the Valley of Saints, the Ajanta and Ellora caves, Villa Schönberg and the Rietberg September–October 2013 • 61 62 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Museum in Zurich), the boundaries between real and imagined spaces, interior and exterior (or fabricated and fabulated) landscapes—in brief, between topos and logos—are often blurred, if not erased, and their correspondences and liminal ambiguities are consistently cross-referenced throughout the book. Similarly...