> I z I H D I H < I Q I ^1 o I of firewood"; the moral dilemma of those, including child soldiers, whom poverty and lies drive tokill their own people; the suffering of women; the courage and humanity of aid workers and journalistswho risk theirlives to "get the storyout"; the inaction of Western govern ments. But one also recalls the sense of communitywithin both small vil lages and huge refugee camps, the strength of women who, "though . . . victimized, emerge more heroes thanvictims," and thedignity of all who suffer within thesepages. The UN Declaration ofHuman Rights follows Hari's acknowledg ments, in which he asserts that tak ing risks for news stories means nothing "unless the people who read them will act." Hari thus chal lenges us to respond to the suffering engendered by ethnic cleansing and genocide. Michele Levy North CarolinaA&T University Doris Lessing. Alfred and Emily. New York. HarperCollins. 2008. viii + 274 pages, ill. $25.95. isbn 978-0-06 083488-3 If itwere proper for her parents' generation, or her own, Doris Less ingmight well have titledher book Emily andAlfred?or justEmily. What the author seeks is another woman in her mother, someone other than the oppressive parent who battled endlessly with her daughter, some one other than the mother portrayed in Martha Quest (1952) and A Proper Marriage (1954). Lessing's mother is most redeemed in thenovella that forms the firsthalf of this book. In her mother's (Emily McVeagh's) fic tional life, she doesn't mis-marry Lessing's father. Instead, she contin ues the nursing career she took up against her parents' wishes, marries a prominent doctor rather than a convalescent veteran, and founds a system of private schools forpoor children afterhis death. One of the assumptions Less ingmade in creatingher fiction was that World War I did not occur to ruin the lifeof theman, her father, who wanted nothing more than to farm. She is clear-eyed enough to understand that therewould have been wars on a less extensive scale? between theTurks and theSerbs, in other regions?and that a genera tionofyoung people who had never known war would be attracted to serve. But she imagines that some might return convinced that they ought to fund efforts to serve the needs of the impoverished theyhad encountered. In the autobiographical second half, Lessing speaks of her struggle to recover the better woman from the self-pitying,ailing mother who hated farm life.Both parents filled the childrenwith theGreatWar: life in the trenches, life (forhermother) as a nurse in a hospital filledwith the dying. She feels a generation of bright women were trapped in traditional roles by the disruption of thewar. Having lived through a childhood with all that frustrated mother-energy focused on her, hav ing met other women of her inter war generation whose mothers over managed them,Lessing is all forthe bright and pluckywomen being able towork outside thehome. The essays have their own charm, each focused on a slice of Lessing's life in Southern Rhodesia, remembered and sometimes revis ited: her reading as a child, what they ate, how they related to ser vants, how she discovered some thingofhermother's previous social life when shewas permitted to take out dresses in her mother's trunk, her second marriage to Gottfried Lessing, her brother's remembrance of World War II and his activities in Rhodesia's Liberation War. Appropriately, Alfred and Emily endswith a scene Idon't recallbeing in the Martha Quest series:hermoth erhosting and playing songs for the RAF pilots who were waiting for the troopships that would take them home after the war. Having ere ated a fictional life forher mother, it's as if Doris Lessing can now admit something of thepower, hap piness, and achievements of Emily McVeagh back into the real life of EmilyMcVeagh Tayler. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma BaptistUniversity Warren Motte. Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2008. 237 pages. $29.95. isbn 978-1-56478-503-9 Even froma firstglance at the title of Warren Motte's text Fiction Now, many readers and critics may well pause before the elusive term now, for theymay associate itwith the difficulties inherent in attempting to pinpoint the current state of French fiction that remains in a continuous cycle of regeneration. Yet for those who spend too much time contem plating the impossibility indefining the now, theunderlying, polyvalent characteristics of French fiction will remain out of reach and the true import ofMotte's textwill remain undiscovered. However, those who have ques tioned French fiction'spurpose and usefulnesswill continue, eitherout of curiosity?for Motte's title is, in fact, provocative?or out of an attempt to better comprehend the contempo rary French literary scene. For these IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 78 i World Literature Today ^Hjj| , readers there awaits a plethora of 1 information, meticulously arranged , and explained in clear and straight 1 forward language. Instead of read i ing now as current, I propose to read [ the term in the sense of urgency. i Indeed, Motte's text is a success , ful demonstration of contemporary i French fiction's veritable clarion call i to, in the words ofEzra Pound inhis 1 1935 collection of essays, "Make It 1 New." Despite the factthat many of 1 thewriters featured inMotte's text 1 differ in concerns and approaches, they all rise up to answer Pound's 1 call since, according toMotte, "they , share a crucialwill tomake French 1 fiction new." , In an exhaustive and superbly 1 detailed analysis of many of the 1 major contemporary French fiction ' writers?much too long tobe listed 1 here?Motte proves that French fic , tion is more concerned with how 1 fiction is instead ofwhat it consti , tutes. Throughout Motte questions 1 the status of the novel as medium, as 1 a self-reflexive platform for rethink 1 ing the familiar and theunfamiliar. 1 From the textual representation of , hitherto absent characters such as 1 factory workers and mental patients 1 to the transformationof the loathed 1 banlieue (suburbs) froma lieude ban 1 (a place of banishment) to a rejuve 1 nated and privileged experience of 1 the world through the lens of fiction, [ Motte establishes a dynamic through 1 which contemporary French fiction , remains viable as both a literary 1 agent and a cultural form. 1 Thus Fiction Now, read as a 1 form of critical urgency to ques 1 tion, rethink, and rejuvenate French [ fiction,bears witness not only to a 1 desire tomake fictionnew but also , to surpassing the superficial realm 1 of the familiar (i.e., the dynamic of , mere production and reception), to a 1 more clearly articulated examination of the relationship between writer and reader. In this way, Motte estab lishes thenovel as a dialogue on the many uses of French fiction, and he adeptly teaches us that the con temporary novel is alive and well. In the end, he invites us tomove past accepted structures and limita tions in order to fully embrace the moment of plenitude that is artistic creation. Albert SamuelWhisman UniversityofOklahoma Maghiel van Crevel.Chinese Poetry in Times ofMind, Mayhem andMoney. Leiden, The Netherlands / Boston. Brill. 2008. xviii + 518 pages. ?115/$ 171. isbn 978-90-04-16382-9 The culmination of more than a decade of research, much of it con ducted "on the ground," Chinese Poetry inTimes of Mind, Mayhem and Money strikes a judicious balance between tracing the genealogy of the Chinese avant-garde and pro filing themajor poets and polemi cists who have helped shape that lineage. Among the poets Maghiel van Crevel discusses at length are both older,more established figures such as Yu Jian, Han Dong, and Xi Chuan, whose work and influence have long transcended any specif ic movement or milieu, as well as such younger poets as Shen Haobo and Yin Lichuan, who cofounded the still-controversial Beijing-based "Lower Body Movement," which has the dual distinction of being the firstgroup in China to write about sex, drugs, crime, bar life, lowlifes, and otherblemishes on the underbelly of China's new urban landscape and to use the Internet as a virtually in-your-face alternative to conventional print publication. Although van Crevel insists that Internetpoetry lies outside the scope of his study, he has much to E say of interest on the subject. He E notes, for instance, that while even E older poets who came into their E own years before theworld went E online "avidly use theweb to com- E municate directlywith other poets, E critics and general readers," most E Chinese poets have been comparaE tively slow to explore thepossibili- E ties of "multimedial and interactive E reading and writing." E One notable exception is the E subject of the last and (tomy lights) E most engaging chapter in thebook: E Yan Jun, a performance poet whom = I had the pleasure of seeing a few E years ago when he came to Taipei E for an artist residency. Combining E computer-generated soundscapes E and video clips with a recitative E style that simultaneously evokes E religious incantation and the icon- E oclastic antics of the edgier slam E poets, Yan Jun's poetry "qualifies E as nothing less than theater."While E poetry like this is best experienced E in "meat space" rather than in print E or audiovisual format, most of Yan E Jun's poems "hold their own as E 'mere' writing." The same could E be said for van CreveTs transla- E tions, as these closing lines from E Yan Jun's signature poem, "Against E All Organized Deception," should E suggest: "against, against everyE thing. / against ourselves, against E everythingwe are against. / against E everything we are not against. / E against everything about ourselves. E / against everythingwe must not E be against and cannot be against. / E against." E This is but one ofmany trans- E lations in Chinese Poetry inTimes of E Mind, Mayhem andMoney that are E a pleasure to read, somuch so they E leave you hungry for more. E SteveBradbury E Taipei, Taiwan E ? ...