lips, leaving everything else to the imagination . Similarly, the story focuses on the lovers’ passion, evoking in a few sentences the entire life of a once-famous man now defeated, tormented, unrecognizable to his close friends, and a stranger to himself. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers Ed. Elissa Washuta & Theresa Warburton. Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2019. 266 pages. THE BEST ASPECT of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers is its intrinsic anthological quality. This anthology of indigenous writers features one or multiple pieces from twenty-seven Canadian and US authors, a veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered. This is not a collection of instantly recognizable literary rock star names—Joseph Boyden, Joy Harjo, David Treuer, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Linda LeGarde, Natalie Diaz, and the newest addition to the canon of bright Native writers, Tommy Orange, are conspicuously absent—which leaves this fan of Native literature curious. Still, this book serves up plenty of new discoveries. Consider Stephen Graham Jones’s essay, “Letter to a Just-Starting-out Indian Writer —and Maybe to Myself.” This essay could serve as a summary for this book’s intent and of expectations of indigenous literature overall. This piece asks heavy questions: What topics should we expect to find in an anthology of Native writers? How should we expect them to write? The publishing industry will package Native writers as “exotic,” Jones warns. He Books in Review Burhan Sönmez Labyrinth Trans. Ümit Hussein. New York. Other Press. 2019. 192 pages. COMPACT, thought-provoking, and gently exquisite, Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish author Burhan Sönmez, quietly establishes him as one of Europe’s great contemporary authors. From page one, we are drawn into the immediacy of the main character, Boratin, a youngish jazz musician who has lost his memory following a suicidal leap into Istanbul’s Bosphorus strait. Moved home from the hospital, we follow his studied reimmersion with once-familiar objects and with the family, friends, and social mores that have formed the trappings of his life until then. Largely shut out from this previously ingrained reality, Boratin progresses through clouds of impressions, reflection, reasoning, and evaluation, seizing each new-old thing he meets—propelling the narrative with an etched clarity that sends out sparks at every turn. The effect of the book’s simple clauses, infused with a continual stream of sensual description, is hypnotic. Sönmez has a knack for finding just the right offhand detail to throw a scene or stream of thought into perfect philosophical relief—akin perhaps to Don DeLillo’s prose, yet tempered here with a sort of European humility. In place of DeLillo’s hard irony, a brilliantly earned sensuality restores a sense of narrative wholeness in how we experience this novel’s unfolding: They had heard that in the beginning was the Word, now they can hear from the book dealer’s voice that in the end too there will only be the Word. Life is comprehending the word. And when the book dealer’s slow-moving lips eventually say that death too consists of words, the young pair raise their heads and BURHAN SÖNMEZ 100 WLT WINTER 2020 also instructs: “Don’t let people shame you about not being an expert on your own culture,” and “You don’t have to be able to define what an Indian is in order to write ‘Indian.’ Putting a definition on us, that’s playing their game.” These authors ask when exactly is it okay to stop talking about the fact that their people suffered genocide at the hands of whites for hundreds of years and that Western corporations continue to desecrate the land and rights of indigenous people today from Canada to Chile. They talk about trying to hold onto their traditions yet simultaneously progress. They are not writing for the acceptance of a white audience but for all the judging of and by each other and the lack of identity they sometimes feel as individuals. Deborah A. Miranda’s “Tuolume” is a grueling, haunting personal narrative...
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Oct 2, 2020
Joachim Barth + 1
Open Access