the original and English translation of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. Those works fit in a carrying case, the valise, and include airmail envelopes, artists’ books, a hand-blown glass sculpture, maps, origami toys, original prints, and posters meant to show affinities for bookmaking, geography, and travel literature. Available in a limited edition, those narratives are taken further by his even briefer essay On Contemporary Art (2018), itself half of Sobre el arte contemporáneo / En La Habana (2016). But Artforum is fictional in Aira’s typically imaginative fashion. That is to say, it is a story full of Duchampian fits and starts in which witty eccentricity struggles with originality to make a point about obsessions—here, a magazine—and Aira is a master at relaying them in each and every one of his tales. Artforum is composed of nine asymmetrical sections, some dated imprecisely from 1983 to 2013, not in strict chronological order, others without a date. There are two final fragments, whose first lines are respectively “Then one day Artforum stopped coming” and “Adam [yes, most likely the biblical one] was the wisest of men, nobody will . . .” Aira does not know if he wants to break or refill his pages with interjections and stops whenever he feels like it. Since he believes that the spirit of narrative becomes a painting, here he visualizes a story of sorts. Writing in Artforum in 2008, Michel Houellebecq claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they reminded him of soil cutting. One can do no less with Aira. The narrator further wonders if Artforum loves him as much as he loves the publication, mixing existential quandaries with the everyday, as in the sections “The Clothespins” and “Conjectures,” which include musings about forms, bread, hippies, and superstitions. With no sign that Artforum will get to him, the narrator decides to make his own Artforum, providing another reason: “My work as a writer was a constant repetition of time’s surrender to waiting. . . . I think of something and together with the thought comes its formulation .” Perhaps the epigraph, attributed to “A Chilean politician,” says it all: “Some say that I am a genius, others that I am a madman . I’m neither one nor the other. The problem is, I read foreign magazines.” Will H. Corral San Francisco Christian Wiman Survival Is a Style New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 112 pages. IN HIS MEMOIR He Held Radical Light, Christian Wiman beautifully illustrates his relinquishment of the ambition to write a poem that would survive forever. Instead, the book offers a poetics of mortality, its beauty fading resignedly. In fact, this apparently modest aestheticism has been anticipated since the 2007 publication of Ambition and Survival. Yet we would obviously be wrong to assume that Wiman’s contentedness of giving up the eternal significance of his poetry—just like his giving up of the eternal dimension of his Christian faith—would mean anything to lessen the import of poetry (or of his religion, for that matter). Indeed, we are reminded of the elliptical statements of faith that bookend the celebrated memoir My Bright Abyss: “once more I come to the edge of all I know / and believing nothing believe in this.” Alternatively, the sentence ends with a colon or a period. As it withdraws or collapses, the statement takes its truth, its faith, with it too. As Wiman has become a major thinker of religious experience besides a poet, it is important to consider this stance: theology is not metaphysics. Now this voice speaks again from Survival Is a Style, Wiman’s latest volume of poetry. If He Held Radical Light shared generously from Wiman’s legacy as editor of Poetry, and from the chamber music of his friendships with Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, and Craig Arnold—whose poem “Meditation on a Grapefruit” is here, perhaps, acknowledged by way of watermelons and other sweet fruits—these poems seem to scuffle around in the background noise of that life, of its pool parties, its faculty meetings , and some somber moments shared with friends. The self-effacing gesture, the withdrawal of the assertion of faith, is achieved at the...