fourmini-Gospels, wherethesame story istold, repeating themaindifficulties confronting thesettlement andultimately leading toitsdemise, whileaddingnewfacts eachtime. In theend,as we knowwell fromnineteenthand twentiethcentury history, theclashbetween Utopias - be theyanarchist orcommunist - and humannature always endswith similar results. Ifthereaderwonders , Whyremind us ofthis today?, thistimeless novelserves as a satiric warning againstfalseheraldsofa newMessianic Age. Michaela Burilkovova Gainesville ,Florida Cynthia Ozick. Foreign Bodies.Boston .Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2010. 255pages. $26.isbn 978-0-547-43557-2 It wouldbe a mistake to think of Foreign Bodies either as anhomage to Henry James's The Ambassadors oras a resetting ofthenovelintheearly 1950s. Onlythepremise isthesame: an emissary sentto Paristo bring backa young manwhohasbeendallying there toolongandmaywellbe under thethrall ofa woman(James); or underthatofthedecadentOld World(Ozick).In TheAmbassadors, Lambert Strether is dispatched to Parisat therequestof Mrs.Newsome ,a wealthy widowandpotentialwife , tosendhererrant sonChad hometorunthefamily business. In Foreign Bodies, theall-enduring BeatriceNightingale (nee Nachtingall), an Englishteacherin an all-male technical high school,is virtually ordered byheraffluent brother Marvin to rescuehis son Julianfrom whatheassumes arethefleshpots of Paris. There aresiblings inboth novels - ChadandSarahinJames, Julian and IrisinOzick,children ofprivilege who behaveaccordingly. But here theresemblances end.Strether's Parisis thetourist's; Bea's,theParis oftheMarais, a onceelegant quarter that fell into neglect after World War II andin1952wastherefuge ofemigresanddisplaced persons. Unlike Dante'sbeloved, Ozick's Beatriceentersthis netherworld withone circle,the dispossessed, toreturn hernephewtohisfather, which never occurs. There isnoone inForeign Bodies withthenobility of James'sMadame Vionnet, Chad's platonic infatuation, ofwhom, James implies, hewilltire andthen return toAmerica toreapthefruits ofcapitalism . Beatrice comesclose,having endureda short-lived marriage to a narcissistic composer who never appreciated herworth, and verbal abusefrom a brother whotreats her as aninferior. Beatrice's questrecallsthatof OedipaMass in ThomasPynchon's TheCrying ofLot49,whoundertakes tobethe executor ofa willthat brings herincontact with America's alienated .Beatrice isexecuting her brother's command, which exposeshertothe refugees oftheMarais, whoarenot Nota Bene Haiti Noir Edwidge Danticat, ed. Akashic Books Ina recent collection ofeighteen short stories celebrating the island nation of Haiti, mention ofthedevastating 2010earthquake seems imperative. Most of the stories, however, were written before the tragedy. Instead ofrendering the collection incomplete orobsolete, these stories become even more significant in the disaster's aftermath ; they celebrate theintense creative spirit ofthecountry andremind usofthe power and necessity of Haitian resilience. Pauline Kaldas The Time between Places University of Arkansas Press Inthis collection ofstories, Egyptian-born Kaldas examines thelives ofEgyptians still living inEgypt andthose whohave immigrated tothe United States. The book explores the process of Immigration infour partsdesire for abetter life, beginnings in a new place, longing for a homeland, and howthenext generation negotiates the two worlds. July -August 2011 167 featured in the guidebooks. Bea's questrequires twotrips toParisand, bychoice, anexcursion toCalifornia, thus becoming herbrother's ambassadortorestore a fragmented family towholeness, butwith dubioussuccess .LikeJames, Ozickis a moralist ,cynically referring to thefaux expatriates whodescend onParisto livetheexistentialist life as "literary tourists/' as distinct fromthereal expatriates. Foreign Bodies isCynthia Ozick'smost mature novel; notonly istheproselushandpoetic, buther insights into a family where a Jewish American prince demotes hissister toa courier areruefully accurate. Bernard F.Dick Fairleigh Dickinson University RafikSchami.The Calligrapher's Secret. Anthea Bell, tr.Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2011. 444 pages. $20.isbn 978-1-56656-830-2 Considered oneoftheleading immigrantwritersin Germany, Rafik Schami(whoserealnameis Suheil Fadel) continues to charmreaders with his fictioninspiredby life in Syria,his originalhomeland. Born in Damascus in 1946 to a Christian father who was a baker, he migrated to Germany in 1971, where he earned a doctoratein chemistry atHeidelberg University and thenworkedin thechemical industry in Germany. In 1982he decidedto devotehimself fullyto writing fiction in German. He has written twenty-seven worksoffictionso far - some translated into morethantwenty-one languages and has received prestigious European literary prizes,including the Hermann Hesse Prizein 1994and theNellySachsPrizein 2006.Die DunkleSeitederLiebe(2004; Eng. The Dark Side of Love,2009),his longestnovel at 853 pages, was beautifully translated intoEnglish by AntheaBell and publishedby Interlink in2009. In TheCalligrapher's Secret , Bell now delights readerswithanother ofSchami's novels, halfas longbut equallycharming and entertaining. It has another plot,of course,but itsstyle is thesame:unhurried, leisurely , relaxed. Schami clearly enjoys describing indetailsettings, actions, and reactions thatmayor maynot matter to thenarrative structure of the whole butarefascinating observations aboutthemanners andcustoms ofthepeopleinDamascus, their religiousandethnic diversity, andmidtwentieth -century Syrian life. Theplotisabouttheloveaffair ofNoura, a married Muslim woman, andSalman, a Christian calligraphy apprentice; it is...