> w P?' Z l-H w D H < w H ? *j c* O 5? iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimii Scott Slovic. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocriti cal Responsibility. Reno. University of Nevada Press. 2008. xv + 245 pages. $24.95. isbn978-0-87417-756-5 In this collection of occasional essays, several published else where, ecocritic Scott Slovic gath ers, under the poles of savoring and saving, the thoughts resulting from more than a decade's worth ofworld travel.The tension he feels between "the responsibility (shared by every living organism) tobe fully present in this lifeand the responsi bility (of a privileged, empowered human citizen) tobe involved with the transgressions and opportuni ties of my community" provides the connective tissue between these disparate essays. While the concept of contemplation in retreat certainly provides a foundation for Slovic's choices here for inclusion, it raises questions about intellectual work that Slovic seems unprepared to analyze with the acuity ofwhich he is capable. In concept, all essays serve his thesis?in practice, some far more successfully than others. In the weakest of the essays, such as "Going Away to Think" and "Eco criticism," Slovic presents the aca demic critic as a "man in a gray flannel suit," an ineffectual "third wheel" whose job is to serve as a kind of sportscaster who describes and contextualizes the work of creative writers and scientists. But elsewhere, Slovic knows better and shows himself to be a much more adept and important thinker.One suspects such lapses could have been avoided with a better round of editing for the collection as a book, rather than as a series of discreet essays. Critics who don't feel the iiiiiiiii.iiiii.iiii.ii.iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii tension between savoring and sav ing (and not necessarily because we are first-world wastrels) will have to search a little harder in these essays forwhat is useful to them, but it ishere. The strongest essays in the col lection give us the truest sense of the critical human at work. In "Be Prepared for the Worst," the most illuminating and challenging essay, Slovic reveals the way a critic's mind works, almost compulsive ly and regardless of the situation at hand, which in this case is the death of a child and the subse quent family-breaking grief.Here, Slovic writes at the height of his intellectual and stylisticpowers. In other standout essays, Slovic gets beyond theutilitarian bibliographi cal essays and offers close readings of literary texts, such as in his chap ter on Rick Bass. I'm not sure who the intended audience is for this collection. Sea soned ecocritics will find the sim plification annoying, or will have encountered some of these essays already, and those new to the field may be put off by the dismissive references to a general audience. Both sets of readers will findmuch to engage in Going Away toThink, but a stronger introduction could have helped us tease out much more. Nancy Cook University of Montana, Missoula Philippe Sollers. Les voyageurs du temps. Paris. Gallimard. 2009. 244 pages. 17.90. isbn978-2-07-077977 2 Philippe Sollers has been a fixture of the Parisian literary establish ment for nearly a half-century as thedirector of the influential review iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.iiiiiii.iiiiii Tel Quel (which became LTnfini in 1982), as a member of the edito rial board of the prestigious Gal limard publishing house, and as the author of an impressive list of books. Through his marriage to the psychoanalyst and literary theorist JuliaKristeva, Sollers also created the image of a latter-day version of the Sartre/Beauvoir couple that once occupied a central place in French intellectual life. Les voya geurs du temps (Time travelers) is fairly representative of theway in which his writing has evolved over the years. In this amalgamation of autobiography, poeticized narra tion, and literary essay, a nameless narrator uses a tone reminiscent of thedistanced irony thathas become the trademark of Sollers in order to recount, not only some of the events in his daily life,but main ly his musings on art, music, and literature. In the process, Sollers reminds us constantly of the con trast that he perceives between the excellence of his aesthetic outlook and thedecadence that is spreading over theworld lying outside of his increasingly lonely literarybubble: "On a pu parier autrefois de 'deca dence' . . . mais lemot qui convient desormais est celui de deliquescence" (While "decadence" may once have been the appropriate term, today it is decay). For Sollers, traveling through time mainly means roaming through literaryhistory, or rather through an accumulation of literary anecdotes. In no particular order, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Michel Houellebecq, T. E. Law rence, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Orwell, and Arthur Rimbaud are all invoked and briefly commented on (and this is of course only a partial list). It 78 i World Literature Today , is difficult to characterize this sort 1 of writing as a series of digres i sions, since there is no real topic to 1 digress from. The narrator attacks i ill-defined "parasites"; he recounts ' occasional trysts with a younger i woman named Viva; early on, , he establishes a parallel between i his practice at a shooting range , and seeking the perfect words for 1 his texts; he regularly attempts to i express the ineffable significance 1 of his highly aestheticized form of i religiosity.Every now and then, the narration switches from first to sec i ond person: "Vous prenez Tavion , ? Hong Kong, vous atterrissez ? 1 Chengdu" (You get on a plane in i Hong Kong, you land in Cheng 1 du). These stylistic transitions are i as random as the narrator's mean [ derings through time, space, and i literary sketches, outside ofwhich, , as he informs us: "Je suis repris 1 par le cauchemar de Texistence" , (I am once again caught up in the 1 nightmare of existence). Within his i textual domain, Sollers is obviously 1 enjoying himself, and perhaps he i has convinced himself that aim , less rambling is a form of poetry, i that aristocratic detachment and a , superficial form of erudition can 1 compensate for ineffectual writing, iEdward Ousselin 1 WesternWashington University ! Joyce Zonana. Dream Homes: From i Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey. [ New York. Feminist Press at CUNY. ' 2008. 221 pages. $15.95. isbn978-1 55861573-1 i Among countless diasporic mem ' oirs, we remember those that most i hauntingly etch a private history , that somehow speaks to our own. ' Dream Homes is such a book. Joyce , Zonana, a professor of literature and women's studies, subtly blends experiences, verbal and photo graphic images, and family recipes into a literaryrepast that embodies both her complex ethnic, religious, and sexual identityand her lifelong search for "home." In 1951, as Arab nationalism and government repression mount ed in Egypt, Zonana's parents fled with their eighteen-month-old daughter fromCairo to Brooklyn. Without a sense of origin, caught between two worlds, Zonana must assemble her past, "the memory I do not have," from "tiny pieces of moveable property" (e.g., jew elry,a prayer rug) and fragmentary responses reluctantly given by par ents unwilling to remember. Extended tropes that link cook ing to writing permeate the text. Repeatedly driven to stuff grape leaves for departmental parties, Zonana traces this persistent need to her parents' New York house hold, Egyptian in its gender roles. Her mother's "sacrament" is food, her own, language. Yet after leav ing Radcliffe in her freshman year and fleeing her parents' home to her own apartment, she is hired to write a cookbook and so learns to cook in order towrite. Food and language also high light her isolation. Shopping with her father, Zonana senses that he feels most athome among theEgyp tian spices, speaking Arabic with the Middle Eastern grocers. But knowing just English and French, the child cannot participate. To her Ashkenazi peers, meanwhile, as a non-Arab Egyptian and Sephardic Jew unaware of gefilte fish,Yid dish, or "kosher," she is neither a real Egyptian nor a real Jew. Zonana cogently captures the forces that fuel her breakdown at Radcliffe and self-destructive E behavior thereafter, as she strugE gles to free herself from the con- E straints of her upbringing: her E paternal grandmother's tyrannical E longing; her mother's early free- E dorn, squelched by marriage, and E her later need tomold Joyce into E a proper Egyptian Jewish girl; her E family's silence about "God, death, E and sex," because of which she E seeks to affirm her existence by E crossing sexual boundaries; her E parents' lost dreams and divided E loyalties; her sense of shame that E Egyptian Jews generally, and her E parents in particular?through their E use of French, allegiance to Euro- E pean culture, and negative stereo- E typing of Arabs?were passively E complicit inEgypt's colonial past. E In ten chapters arranged E around central ideas, people, and E places rather than pure chronol- E ogy, Dream Homes meanders from E New York toOklahoma and New E Orleans before reaching its climax E in a "garbage-strewn" Cairo alley E near the ruined synagogue of Mai- E monides. There, weeping for its E abandonment and decay, as well as E "the history of the Jews inmodern E Egypt, for our community's disloca- E tion, for my family's losses and for E my own," Joyce Zonana feels a one- E ness with thepeople and theplace, E a sensation that allows her to return E toNew Orleans, survive the exodus E from Katrina, and wander at last E back toBrooklyn, having found her E home "in the world." E Michele Levy E North Carolina A&T University E ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ...