Kettly Mars. Fado. Paris. Mercure de France. 2008. 110 pages. 12.50. isbn 978-2-7152-2853-5 In her thirdnovel, KettlyMars uses the rhythms of Portuguese fado music to depict the emotional reawakening of a divorced middle class woman, Anaise, who finds a new life, real or imagined, in a brothel in the slums of Port-au Prince, the Haitian capital. With her ex-husband now remarried to a younger woman and having at last succeeded in fatheringthe child thathis first wife had been unable to produce, Anaise invents a new iden tity, becoming Frida, an unlikely but very much in-demand prostitute at "Bony's, for two generations a bor dello of Fronts-Forts Street." Having transformed herself, Anaise/Frida turns her status as an abandoned woman into a paradoxical source of strength,which she patiently and later irrevocably uses against Leo, her wayward ex-husband. The narrative alternates between the "real" scenes between Anaise and Leo (who,while stillan adulter ous husband, is now his ex-wife's lover) and the "imagined" scenes of Frida and her colleagues at the brothel run by the eponymous and business-minded Bony, a second generation maquereau (pimp). Mars combines elements of a revenge tragedy with social commentary as she describes a woman who is con fronted with thestereotypical choice of being a mother or a whore. Anaise isconscious of the factthatit was not her actions but her childlessness that determined her fate, both marital and otherwise: "I now realize that Leo was secretly resentful of my bar ren womb." Written in French, with very few traces ofCreole, Mars's book is divided into short segments of two or three pages each, a loose structure that allows for quick narrative transi tionsand flashbacks.A briefaccount of a localwoman who stabbed her husband as he was sleeping in his mistress's bed adds a new level of tension to the scenes between Ana i'se and Leo, while foreshadowing the stark alternative?"you hold in your hand both life and death"? thatAnai'se will contemplate in the finalpages of thenovel. It isAnaise's acquisition of a new identity that makes this very short novel capti vating. The author succinctly shows how the central character's trans formation is reflected in the eyes of her colleagues at her "real" job as a graphic designer,who had expected her to collapse into loneliness and humiliation, and who feel some what disappointed that she does not do so. The overt comparison of theAnaise and Frida identities is subtly paralleled by the implicit and ironic juxtaposition, as inverted mirror images of each other, of the respectably middle-class Leo with Bony, the disreputable denizen of the brothel. Another irony is that Anaise's new persona will allow her, albeit too late, to obtain what she had ostensibly renounced through her divorce: love, passion, and even becoming pregnant. EdwardOusselin WesternWashingtonUniversity ViktorPelevin. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Andrew Bromfield, tr. New York. Viking. 2008. xiii+ 335 pages. $25.95. isbn978-0-670-01988-5 In The Sacred Book of theWerewolf Viktor Pelevin, one of the most inter esting Russian writers of the post Soviet period, tells the story of a two-thousand-year-old werefox: a character fromChinese mythology who, in her modern incarnation, works as a virtual prostitute inMos- E cow. The authenticity of the fox's E memoir is questionable. Itspublica- E tion is contingent upon a process of E double mediation: a text file found E on the hard disk of a laptop com- E puter discovered in aMoscow park E that circulated among occult fringe E groups andwas published as a book. E In the "Commentary by Experts," E which is part of the fictional story, E the text is identified as a "literary E forgery." The "experts" argue that E the text "is interesting only as a E symptom of the profound spiritual E decline through which our society is E currently passing." E Funny, absurd, sad, and lyriE cal, Pelevin's novel interweaves the E author's familiar themes of Simula- E era and metamorphosis, drawing as E itdoes fromboth Eastern andWest- E ern philosophical sources, and calls E intoexistence a...