WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW Hl^HHHHHHIH lation. In terms of literary views on the subject, one thbriks easily of Haruki Murakami's 1985 sci-fi/B movie spoof Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, where the hero works both inside and outside his own body to solve the mys tery of his own impending death. In his sixth novel, Odigos Epiviosis (Survival guide), Yiorgos Zarkada kis attempts such a mixture of sci fi and neo-noir romance, reflecting consistently the author's own inter ests: artificial intelligence and neural networks, journalism and the world of current affairs. The protagonist? the author's alter ego?who suffers from autoprosopagnosia, a unique neurological condition that does not allow him to see the reflection of his own face?becomes involved in an attempted murder mystery bring ing together unsettled scores from the time of the German occupation of Greece and the Nazi pogroms against the Greek Jewish populace and the shady dealings of faceless media moguls, corrupt politicians, and ruthless Russian oligarchs. While the reader easily expects the revelation that the victim of the assassination is the protagonist him self, cut off from reality because of the bullet lodged in his brain and wandering in an esoteric universe no less real, some other links are not necessarily expected, though not necessarily plausible. The protago nist's mysterious lover, Mina, turns out to be the daughter of the Russian oligarch, who turns out to be the only survivor of a Jewish family the protagonist's father betrayed to the Nazis. What matters in this novel, however, is not so much the opposi tion between inner and outer uni verse, which allows for some clever magic realism to enter the story, but the greater opposition between 721 World Literature Today a seemingly clear reality and the labyrinthine subtext of history-as trace and existence-as-chaos. Under neath it all?and evident in the clean choice of the protagonist by the end of the book?is the researcher's (be he a journalist or a scientist or a lover) yearning for what is known in science as the "beautiful" truth, the foolproof QED. The strange illness, the amnesia, the quantum dualities, or the puns regarding the "insular" wound of the protagonist are meta phors for the post-Lacanian malaise of not-knowing-oneself, but also (unlike the hopeful classical philoso phers) knowing that one is unable, or unwilling unto death, to know oneself and take responsibility for the sins of the fathers. Christina Dokou University of Athens VERSE Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-first Century. Norman Minnick, ed. Buffalo, New York. White Pine. 2010. 260 pages. $17. isbn 978-1 935210-07-8 Between Water and Song reads like a new salvo in an old war. Back in the 1960s, American literature was enlivened by anthology after anthol ogy, each bravely proclaiming itself the "new" poetry, each one defining itself as much negatively, against other poetries, as positively celebrating its own writers. IXiring the past three or four decades, this kind of territorial ity has been muted, but now Norman Minnick, the editor of Between Water and Song, stakes out his ground?"The severe drought caused by Language poetry and the tedium and irony of the postmodernists are certainly contrib uting to the ruin"?in familiar terms. These poets are "for the Twenty-first Century," as if we are to discount their elders of the outdated twenti eth. More honestly, though, several of the contributors acknowledge their immediate elders?from Paul Celan to Efheridge Knight?with honor. The fifteen poets in this book may be young, but they are not new. There are dozens of older, well-known poets working with form and content of poetry in ways more daring and deep than anything in this book. What they bring to us are young voices, each cUstinct with its own specific accent, like a platoon of infantry in a World War II movie. Reveling in diversity, we have Eastern European voices, His panic voices, hyphenated and Native American, African, and African Amer ican voices. At least four of the fifteen poets have come to English as a second...