Invisible Country: Four Polish Plays Teresa Murjas, ed. & tr. Intellect This collection marks a unique effort to characterize the fragile identity of Poland through theater. Themes of “suicide, revolution and domesticity” emerge as essential paradigms of the Polish artistic landscape, and practical elements of theatrical craft are explored. Accompanied by photographs of each play in performance, Murjas’s interpretations affirm the essential role of the translator in modern theater. July–August 2013 • 65 Kari Hotakainen The Human Part Owen F. Witesman, tr. MacLehose Press Hotakainen offers a satire of contemporary society and corporate economics against the backdrop of his native Finland. An elderly lady agrees to sell the true story of her life to a struggling writer, but, as her experiences become text, her honesty grows questionable. Owen F. Witesman skillfully captures the sentiment of the novel, as does its amusing cover art. Nota Bene upon the discovery of his archives, the first great writer of the twenty-first century. The action takes place at Semper Vero, the estate originally inhabited first by Iulus’s grandparents, who arrived with nothing but the bust of Erasmus, suggesting that Iulus inherited the family traits of social criticism and humor. Here, Iulus lives with his parents: his father, a dog whisperer with a fondness for a painting titled White Poodle in a Punt, and his mother who, when Iulus brings home an unsatisfactory school report, merely smiles and draws the document across his palm leaving a paper cut. The dog days of Cannonia have arrived, but in Cannonia all days are dog days. Dogs are “a kind of theme in a larger drama over which we had already lost control.” Iulus spends hours documenting the conversations around attempts of his father to train the unruly dog of a visiting professor. Luckily, Cannonians are loquacious, and Iulus captures Sternean capriccios of passionate opinions spiced with memorable aphorisms: “Art is something which happens between accident and its criticism”; “If you cannot be truthful, then at least be deep”; “The best pet is a pet idea”; and “Each hour dooms Man, the last one kills him.” Cannonians say, “To be well hidden is to live well,” so just who hides from whom in this spy novel? Rufus uses counterintelligence to document the agent Iulus. Iulus is the independent operator, possibly CIA, who documents everyone else. By the end of the novel, Iulus has disappeared and Rufus is left to comb Iulus’s extensive archive in search of the story. How sure is he in trusting his narrator? Not sure at all. He says, “This is rather like asking the question: can one trust a sonata?” Newman’s writing is as fabulous and convoluted as Cold War rhetoric, which the author describes as a “bizarre sideshow of poetic illusions.” This is a novel built upon a cloak of secrecy that continually flashes an interior lining of dazzling shot silk. Christopher Willard Calgary Per Petterson. It’s Fine by Me. Don Bartlett, tr. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2012 (©2011). isbn 9781555976262 Translated at last, Per Petterson’s second novel is a portrait of the artist as a young rebel. Its style and themes anticipate his later works while echoing the influences, chiefly London and Hemingway, that shape its first-person narrator and aspiring writer, Audun Sletten. As with all Petterson’s works, setting plays a vital role. This pre–oil boom Norway features the dwellings, bars, and factories of its marginalized workers alongside a resplendent, unspoiled nature, and its youth embrace American literature, music, and film. Like the “unpurple” prose his best friend, Arvid, favors, Audun’s (Petterson ’s) style is terse but lyrical. It distills both the noisy reality and sometimesbloody consequences of the printing trade in which Audun works (having chosen to leave high school a year before graduation) and moments of preternatural beauty, as when a suddenly startled horse stuns Audun with its splendor. Weaving between past and present tenses, Audun disrupts linearity with frequent flashbacks. Like Wordsworth ’s “spots of time,” these illuminate insights and emotions that form 66 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews the man he will become. We meet him first at thirteen, nervously attending his new school in the city to which his mother has...
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Mar 1, 2013
Olga M Hubard 
Open Access