Lost Books Month: Found Books - Hesperus Press

Hesperus Press is possibly my favorite publishing house. I love their titles, style and approach. Their motto is "to bring near what is far - both in time and space." Over the years Hesperus has done amazing work to uphold this motto.

Titles like Cyrano de Bergerac's prototype science fiction picaresque, Journey To The Moon and Giuseppe Garibaldi's staggeringly exciting memoir, My Life (which was never rendered into English until Hesperus did so) are among a sea of others equally lost and then found.

Their books are handsome productions that often contain enlightening introductions, afterwords or supplemental readings that all shed light on the importance of the work.

They are not easy to get a hold of these days.

To say their books are hard to come by these days in the States is an understatement. Once upon a time there were cardboard displays housing Hesperus titles in nearly every Barnes & Noble. Over the last couple years the titles have been increasingly hard to order.

Nonetheless here are three titles that Hesperus "found" this year. I think you'll understand my profuse praise after one glance at these titles. I hope to review a couple of them more thoroughly once I can actually have one in my clutches.

Hesperus Press' Found Books


The Topless Tower by Sylvina Ocampo. Translated by James Womack. Fiction. Hesperus Press. Trade paperback. ISBN: 1843918552. $14.95.

Hesperus Press synopsis...

When a mysterious stranger arrives laden with paintings, Leandro finds his quiet life instantly and mysteriously disrupted. Awakening locked in a windowless room in a topless tower, he finds himself trapped—the subject in one of the stranger’s eerie paintings. Heavily influenced by nonsense literature such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the surrealist movement in South America, The Topless Tower features all the typical hallmarks of Silvina Ocampo’s fantastical writing. With subtle inflections of language and tremendous displays of imagination running riot, Ocampo’s writing is beautifully translated here by James Womack.

DA's comment...

Ocampo was a brilliant editor and writer who often collaborated with fellow Argentines Jorge Lois Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Her work has often been overlooked in translation but with this fresh translation by Hesperus English language readers will have a chance to enjoy her innovative approach to the fantastical.


On Deception by Harry Houdini. Foreword by Derren Brown. Essays. Hesperus Press. Trade paperback. ISBN: 1843916134. $12.95.

Hesperus Press synopsis...

Throughout his life, the world’s most famous escapologist strove to expose the methods and tricks of illusionists and sham spiritualists. Studying entertainers and criminals alike, Houdini investigates the tricks of the mind and sleights of hand that have deceived people throughout history. The magician’s writings caused a public sensation; legend has it that his book The Right Way to Do Wrong was bought in bulk by burglars in an attempt to guard the tricks of their trade. This collection also includes Houdini’s revelations about the methods behind some of his own most famous tricks, and articles he wrote to expose his imitators.

DA's comment...

Are you kidding me? This has to be one of the coolest republications of the year. The master of misdirection and, well, lying sets forth the principles and blue prints of his trade. I've ordered this book twice and still haven't got it yet. How it pains me to wait.


The Devil's Disciple by Shiro Hamao. Translated from the Japanese by Keith Vincent. Fiction. Hesperus Press. ISBN: 1843918579. Releases in October of 2010.

Hesperus Press synopsis...

The first English language translation of a chilling murder mystery by a prolific Japanese detective novelist

‘Prosecutor Tsuchida, I am being held here as a murderer. But the truth is that I am probably not that murderer. That’s right. Probably.’

While Shimaura Eizo sits in jail awaiting trial for the murder of a beautiful young woman, his erstwhile lover and initiator into a sinister, restless existence has risen in the ranks of the legal profession and is now the prosecutor on the case. Spinning a complex web of events and influences in this chilling murder mystery, Hamao probes the notion of guilt—both psychological and legal.

DA's comment...

Combine the words prolific detective novelist and first English language translation and you have the attention of this plot loving monoglot.

Hopefully this one can be a tipping point for the good firm from the UK.

Lost Books Month - Guest Review by Christopher Schaeffer: Zenobia by Gellu Naum

I am happy to welcome back Christopher Schaeffer of Ghost Or Balloon back for another Lost Books Month guest post. The prose-poetic novel he reviews today, Zenobia, currently lives in a half-light of in print status. It appears available on many major websites but either fails to ship or is listed as clearance.

I have included a link to Northwestern's bookshop, which might be the best way to obtain a copy.

I will post two books of my own next week, probably on Tuesday and Wednesday.

By the way, Christopher, kudos on using the word bajillion.

Gellu Naum's Zenobia reviewed by Christopher Schaeffer


Zenobia by Gelly Naum. Translated by Sasha Vlad and James Brook. Fiction. Northwestern University Press. Trade paperback. ISBN: 0810112558. 192 pps. $18.

In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles famous introduces himself to the good doctor as “Ein Teil von jener Kraft/ Die stets das Bose will, und stets das Gute schafft”—that is, to put a gloss on it, a part of the universal force that always causes good by evil. It’s an aptly inclusive little aphorism for that polymath work, and all too easy to apply to the broader world of letters, where necessity is often an appallingly deadbeat mother to invention. Imagine a perfect world turning out a Dostoyevsky or a Kafka; Berryman or Lowell without crippling mental demons to wrestle with; Rousseau without a stifling order to rail against; Dante without a bajillion miscellaneous pricks of various degrees to occupy his Hell. Even setting aside the boring truism of the artist as melancholy and passionately afflicted creature, its one of the curious paradoxes of literature that the most intensely humanizing and luminous works come from the most chilling conditions, so that, for example, its difficult to put down Coleridge without being tempted to think “well thank God for opium addiction and bipolar disorder.”

That’s the position I found myself in after finishing Gellu Naum’s Zenobia, a bizarre literary time-capsule and a gorgeous work of poetic prose. Naum, a founding figure in the Bucharest Surrealist circle of the 1940’s, soon found his incredible knack for febrile dreaminess and abstract tension nipped in the bud by the post-war mandate for more, more, more Socialist Realism. For the next 20 odd years of Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime, he cranked out children’s books and translations, secretly persisting with his Surrealist poetry but not risking publication.

What this means for us, fortunate readers, is that Zenobia has the mysterious flavor of something from another time, something which spent decades pacing its cell and fermenting while outside literature proceeded away from the touchstones of surrealism. Zenobia is a model surrealist anti-novel, sure, but it’s more than that—it contains all of the frustrations and melancholy and wistfulness of an art pent up for too long. It has the dreamy aesthetic meandering of Breton’s Mad Love and the emotional immediacy of Herta Muller, a mix resulting in a surrealism more plastic than truly dream-like, more febrile than narcotic. The closest thing I can think of by way of comparison is Boris Vian, but Naum’s stakes are higher, his tragedies more deeply felt.

Zenobia is, roughly, a love story, between the poet Gellu Naum and the silent, pliant woman he decides to dub Zenobia. It slouches wearily between Romania’s under-developed marsh regions to a vast and anonymous Bucharest populated by ghosts and the ghostly living. It is, well, pretty goddamn bleak.

This persistent overcast mood, and the intensity of the narrator’s commitment to it, is the largest stylistic difference between Naum and Vian. Both writers craft worlds of dream-like anomie, where agency flutters between people, ideologies, and inanimate objects like a fickle metaphysical moth, where romantic love is more epistemological than erotic, and where physics seem to obey poetic rather than natural laws. However, where Vian isn’t afraid to have a little fun with this situation—his Les Ecumes des Jours occasionally hits Tom & Jerry-esque levels of manic slapstick—Naum for the most part remains all business. His commitment to a mood is deeply serious, deeply thoughtful. It’s the attitude of a writer whose right to occupy a fictional universe of dream-logic and fantasy was hard-fought and traumatizing. His approach to fantasy is expressed succinctly in Zenobia’s titular character:

For Zenobia there is nothing unimportant or common: in this respect she is like a magnifying glass in which the world changes size, naturally and by itself, in slow patterns, and doesn't strive to exist; through her, eclipses disappear in an all-absorbing clarity.

It can be a difficult novel to approach. After tracking down a 15-year old copy from Northwestern University’s “Writings From an Unbound Europe” line, it took several tentative attempts to break through the initial scenes of the book. These, which depict the narrator wandering starving in the wilderness for unspecified reasons, are among the most gratuitously squalid of the novel, but also include some of Naum’s lyrical peaks:

“Please review, while I, crouched in front of that void that I called ‘the window,’ lay in wait for the coming of spring; little by little, the snows melted, a deep serenity filled my heart when, as the snow diminished, the wet black earth appeared; puddles were left as evidence down through the valley; as far as the eye could see, a kind of undecided presentiment of grass started to cover the field with its green color, and so on; on the other side of the dam the reeds seemed to awaken and millions of dazed insects, invisible until yesterday, started their circling again, in the sunlight, which grew warmer with every passing day; from time to time I went out in front of the door to howl; I would howl two or three times, look over the field (lest somebody should hear me), then go back inside; one day I plucked new grass, vigorous and fresh, from the dam, and I returned with my boot soles caked in cold, sticky mud.”

As the novel proceeds from the wilds into the city, Naum’s formal experimentation grows bolder. Chapters break down into brief, numbered sections, interspersed with bizarre journalistic non-sequitors:

“In Montemosola the annual competition for the most beautiful mustache was won by the Greek, Nicolas Stassinos, the owner of a 24-inch mustache.”

In the city, Naum’s sentences grow increasingly tangled and expansive, the self-referential qualities glimpsed in the passage above exert more and more weight on the narrative, language is subverted and undercut, until the linguistic burden of modernism drives his characters back into the natural world. In terms of plot, that about covers it. However, the novel is sprinkled with elements that hint temptingly at a cohesive story, leads that expire in bathos or dread, leaving the narrator as baffled as the reader.

The translation by James Brook and Sasha Vlad (the only English translation, as far as I know) is fairly utilitarian while capturing the half-weary, half-electrified tone of Naum’s narrator. The contrast between the often flat, prosaic tone and the wild overgrowth of each individual sentence is effectively rendered, although I got the impression that they grew into the novel’s unique demands as they progressed—it becomes progressively smoother and more compelling as it goes.

Zenobia is not necessarily an easy novel to love, and at times seems openly hostile to the reader. Naum is anything but a household name in the U.S., and even among fans of Eastern European literature or surrealism he’s relatively obscure. However, Zenobia exerts a strange grip on those who’ve read it, almost on a par with the zealous fans of Raymond Queneau or Flann O’Brien.

Lost Books Month: Found Books - NYRB Classics

The collection of books known as the NYRB Classics constitutes one of the most important efforts in US publishing. They are more or less the 800 lbs gorilla of literary conservation. It should be noted that they are a benevolent 800 lbs gorilla, and one with a staggering list of books they've brought back from obscurity.

In the tradition of the two other "Found Books" posts I'd like to take a moment to feature three of the books they've brought back this year. One of them I reviewed a few weeks ago.

Incidentally I'm looking at two others currently and will post a full review of them somewhere down the line. What can I say? NYRB Classics are like cookies and milk to me.


NYRB Classics


The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore. Afterword by Mary Gordon. NYRB Classics. Trade paperback. ISBN: 9781590173497. 240 pps. $14.95.


From the NYRB Classics website...

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an unflinching and deeply sympathetic portrait of a woman destroyed by self and circumstance. First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established him as an astute chronicler of the human soul.

Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices and pieties of her genteel Belfast upbringing. But Judith has a secret life. And she is just one heartbreak away from revealing it to the world.

Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Nick Tosches. Fiction. New York Review Of Books. Trade Paperback. 275 pps. ISBN: 9781590173480. $14.95.


From the May 10th Front List / Back List...

When he was found in his empty apartment he had a suit on and in his pocket he carried business cards that at the four corners read: NO ADDRESS, NO PHONE, NO BUSINESS, NO MONEY and in the center: RETIRED. It was September of 1962. Nightmare Alley, Gresham's biggest critical and monetary success, was utterly out-of-print.

Nightmare Alley is about crime and dilemma, guilt and madness, and pulls you in like the mark that you are. It is a novel about the fast-talking, quick misdirection of carnivals. It is about sexual obsession, murder and above all else, alcoholism.

It has also lived a largely underground existence. When Gresham died, no paper carried the story except the New York Post. The bridge columnist mentioned his passing. It seems the cards at least honored the man they apparently condemned.

The label of cult classic was seemingly the novel's fate. That is until 2010 when New York Review Of Books did what they do and brought it back to life, replete with insightful Foreword by Nick Tosches. This is not a book that should be underground. This is one for the 20th century's "best" lists.

The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis. Translated from the Greek by Peter Levi. Fiction. NYRB Classics. Trade paperback. ISBN: 9781590173503. 144 pps. $12.95.


From the NYRB Classics website...

The Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. Hadoula knows about herbs and their hidden properties, and women come to her when they need help. She knows women’s secrets and she knows the misery of their lives, and as the book begins, she is trying to stop her new-born granddaughter from crying so that her daughter can at last get a little sleep. She rocks the baby and rocks her and then the terrible truth hits her: there’s nothing worse than being born a woman, and there’s something that she, Hadoula, can do about that.

Peter Levi’s matchless translation of Alexandros Papadiamantis’s astonishing novella captures the excitement and haunting poetry of the original Greek.

Lost Books Month: Guest Writer stevenallenmay Discusses The Poetry Of N.H. Pritchard

The Devil's Accountant is proud to present a guest writer for Lost Books Month. Poet & publisher, stevenallenmay of Plan B Press, has stopped by to share some thoughts on an author whose contributions to Concrete and LANGUAGE poetry have been recognized by the adept and yet whose writings are largely missing from bookstore and library shelves.

This is what Lost Books Month is about, people.

stevenallenmay is a talented poet and publisher and you would do well to familiarize yourself with his work. Something I've done before, much to my personal edification I might add.

The floor is yours, bard.

N.H. Pritchard's Books


My interest in Norman Howard Pritchard III is personal, I discovered books from his personal library at a recycling center in 2003. All signed by Pritchard, some with keepsakes and photos in them. I had no idea who Pritchard was. The more I researched the more I realized how little was known of his life after the appearance of his second book, and moreover, the less I understood what had happened to him.

Here was an Afro-American concrete poet who had managed, as so many previous authors had managed, to disappear from public awareness and whose books had fallen out of print. From 2003 to present, I have found a bit about the man and his books. His two books were published with a year of each other and there were no further collections of his work until his death.

His work appeared in Umbra and in several other journals throughout the 1960’s. With the release of these two books, however, his publishing career seems to have ended. It ended with two out of print books by a truly innovative and forgotten poet.


The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970 by N. H. Pritchard. Doubleday. 1970.

The Matrix is a collection of work encapsulating a decade. He demonstrates a range of poetry styles in these 203 pages, with much of the book taken over by Visual or Concrete Poetry forms. While some have suggested that Pritchard had adapted the spacing and typography of e e cummings, it could well be true that his visual component has more to do with musical notation (he did contribute pieces to two “spoken word” albums in the 1960’s, one can hear intentional repetition in – for example – his piece “Gyre's Galax”) . The book has a clear visual presence that is unexpected in a Doubleday published collection of poetry for the times. One has to wonder how successful the book was expected to be when the market for an Afro-American Concrete Poet seems precariously small.


EECCHHOOEESS. N. H. Pritchard. New York University Press. 1971.

EECCHHOOEESS is in a sense a continuation of the vispo efforts begun in his earlier book. While some of the work seems confined to the dimensions of the book itself, it’s evident that the author sees the physical book as something of an obstacle – the work expands beyond the page and beyond the edges of the book. In addition to his new non-linear, representation “language”, he shreds the English that he does use into extremely fragmented entities. Anticipating the use and abuse of language in the Computer age he could only imagine.
To say that he was ahead of his time is to be kind to his time. Not wholly accepted into any prevailing “group” or category seems to have further distanced him from those who might have gotten his work during his publishing lifetime. It ought not surprise one that the poet Charles Bernstein embraced Pritchard as a forefather of LANGUAGE poetry once he discovered his work, in 2005. He had not known of him prior!

These books along with whatever can be retrieved of his “uncollected works” need to be brought back to light, to make his work “unLOST”.

-stevenallenmay

Apparently some of Pritchard's contemporaries agree with stevenallenmay. You may recognize some of these names.

Lost Books Month - Found Books: Archipelago Books

Founded in 2003, Archipelago Books is a not-for-profit press that has made it a point to bring works of the highest merit either back into print or into the English language for the first time. Whether through improved translations or first time issues, Archipelago has truly done truly amazing work to promote books that were either out-of-print or formerly unknown to English audiences.

As with the theme of the month, today I going to put you on to three books from their catalog this year. Finding books is what Lost Books Month is about and there are few publishing firms that have done the work in finding books like Archipelago.

Here are three books recently "found" by Archipelago. Remember that the only way to keep them "found" is by going out and procuring yourself a copy. Sorry, it's just the system we're beholden to.


Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss. Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg. Archipelago Books. Fiction. Trade paperback. ISBN: 0980033039. 350 pps. $17.


From Archipelago Books' website...

First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.

Wonder by Hugo Claus. Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. Fiction. Archipelago Books. Trade Paperback. 338 pp. ISBN: 9780980033014. $15.


From a February 2010 Devil's Accountant Front List/Back List post...

Claus' hapless but intelligent protagonist is Victor de Rijckel, a schoolteacher. Victor is clearly mentally unstable and, lucky for us, also the supposed author of the book we are reading. He is not however an unreliable source. Despite the revelation that Rijckel is penning his book from the confines of a madhouse, the reader should still believe his story. There is something intrinsic in de Rijckel's Belgium. Whether in the eternal collaboration of big business (in his case Haakebeen's Lumber and Furniture Center) with the powers that be (NAZI or foreign occupying) or the echoes of a fascistic sense of inherited destiny espoused by Victor's Principal, Claus' world relates to ours with disturbing ease.

The story itself sums up easily, if somewhat absurdly. Victor, a teacher who has been divorced by a student whom he married, meets a remarkable beauty at the town's annual costumed ball, which is named The White Rabbit Ball. He follows her and her male suitors to the sea, where, following an antisemitic outburst, she drives off leaving the suitors to ponder her existence. In short order, and with the assistance of his very own Sancho Panza manifested in an impish boy from the school he teaches at, de Rijckel learns the whereabouts and seeks out this mysterious woman.

I wondered about the ball's name to some degree, as the theme of madness and an increasingly lurid adventure full of fearful tyrants and bizarre benefactors aligns well with that other rabbit hole induced fantasy, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.

From Archipelago Books' website...

In his novels, Hugo Claus lays bare the haunted underbelly of twentieth-century Flanders with portaits of a shattered society and warped psyches rising to a mythic pitch. In Wonder, Victor-Denijs de Rijckel, a bewildered schoolteacher, is led to a distant village in pursuit of a mysterious woman. Tracking her to an underground political conference in a remote castle, he poses as an expert on Crabbe, a messianic Belgian fascist who disappeared in World War II. Drifting into a dense fog as his sanity begins to crumble, de Rijckel soon finds himself trapped among a handful of desperate individuals still living out the consequences of their collaboration with the Nazis decades earlier, all of whom are united by their belief that Crabbe's return is imminent. The subtle cadences of the prose and the dense emotional texture of characters lost in complex moral labyrinths make Wonder a symphony only Claus could have composed.

A Time For Everything by Karl O. Knausgaard. Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson. Archipelago Books. Fiction. Trade paperback. 600 pps. ISBN: 098003308X. $20.


From Archipelago Books' Website...

In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings, one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch . . . This event is decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes himself to the pursuit and study of angels, the intermediaries of the divine. Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring through to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines pivotal encounters between humans and angels: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot’s shame in Sodom; Noah’s isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the seventeenth century. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes – from the Bible and beyond – Knausgaard’s imagination takes flight: the result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic, spellbinding best. Incorporating and challenging tradition, legend, and the Apocrypha, these penetrating glimpses hazard chilling questions: can the nature of the divine undergo change, and can the immortal perish?

Lost Books Month: Tumult by Botho Strauss

This one is kind of complex. The book is out-of-print and was barely (if at all) distributed anywhere other than the United Kingdom. That being said, the press that brought the respected German novel to English audiences (via the equally respected translator, Michael Hulse) is still alive. Quite alive in fact, and purveyors of many amazing and wonderful titles.

More confounding still is the fact that Botho Strauss is alive and enshrined as one of Germany's greatest modern writers. Not to mention one of the most controversial ones as well.

So what gives?

Tumult simply must not have sold well in translation. Perhaps it was the milieu of the mid 1980's that stifled its aggressively visceral approach to the middle class sturm und drang of the late 20th century. Also possible is the idea that translations, particularly ones so driven by such violent stream of consciousness prose, were simply not popular in that time period.

Perhaps it's both. Or neither. These are conjectures without any foundation in statistics. The fact is though that Tumult is out of print and it is truly an amazing work capable of terrifying insight on human motivations and the ethical frailties such an oft-coined term like that implies.

One thing you should note: Do not take the words "aggressively" and "violent" lightly. This is a book that would make Bret Easton Ellis blush.


Tumult by Botho Strauss. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. Fiction. Carcanet Press. ISBN: 0856354724 (Hardcover) 0856355887 (Paperback). 136 pps. Out-Of-Print.

All these years I've not given him another thought, this domestic fool with the face of a Silenus, the clamorous enemy of the state pensioned off, boiling up revenge on his wretched commander fresh each day with his breakfast milk; but then, half way, his head gave way after all. Robbed of his enemy, of fighting, of killing, he circled lifelessly about, only offering up a sleepy repetition of the old hatred, his great condemnations that at one time made up the entire heat of his person. A father and a slaughterer, dishonourably discharged, now he approaches once again, drapes his heavy coat across my shoulders so that I will draw myself up to full stretch just like the unrecognizable man with the umbrella and bloody mouth under the cadaver beef in Francis Bacon's painting. Let yourself go once more, have a fling, right? And then in perfect silence withdraw to the Institute...

-from Tumult

Botho Strauss writes somewhere on a beautiful fringe. The term postmodern is apropos yet Strauss has such a keen sense of history and a certain classicism about his writing that hard line postmodernists have been turned off from it. He is at once a major innovator of the form and a writer whose communicative powers tend to evoke pedestrian praise from the purely avant-garde.

This of course makes him instantly appealing.

Tumult throws the reader into the internal lives of a handful of Germans living and working in a small "information" company. That is to say a market research firm. The protagonist is Becker, a talented but shiftless man who was once the preternatural wunderkind of the firm and is now, in his third return from departure, a sad ousted lion bereft of anything resembling claws.

Becker cuts a meager figure at the firm. He is on his third trip back into the business, twice trying to leave and discover some more meaningful field of work. The feeling of futility and humiliation permeates every single page dealing with life within the firm.

Becker has found something, though small and humiliating in its own way, in a reborn relationship with his estranged daughter. The internal tension and compressed resentment between the two, built up over years of little to no communication and resentments over emotional issues such as abandonment and envy. As Becker becomes increasingly alienated at work and clearly destined for career failure he increases his endeavor to become close to his daughter in a meaningful way.

Botho Strauss has an uncanny ability to scent each emotion and its impetus. I find no other sense that fits the subtlety to Strauss' crafting of emotion. It sounds somewhat strange, but the heady mixture of exasperation, fatigue, hatred and love that Becker's daughter feels toward her suddenly interested father is unmanning, just like a good perfume. In turn, the awkward and often Saturnal emotions of Becker are horrifically narcissistic.

At one point in the novel Becker's daughter reveals a life-long sickness. She disrobes and displays a claw foot and slightly withered leg. Becker's reaction is at first one of sexual disappointment and then one of guilt born of reciprocity. Please understand that these supposedly deviant thoughts are rendered by Strauss in such delicate and fleeting language that the reader somehow feels the nausea of Becker as he drives them down and away, somewhat horrified by the fact that thoughts such as these exist within.

Tumult is a pessimistic book and nearly horrible to behold. The implication of the selfishness and bestial drive to life is disconcerting, to put it mildly.

This is a book, I fear, that is as accurate a portrayal of man's inner strife as exists.

Please, write the press if you have time and express an interest in purchasing the book. Perhaps if enough people show interest they can bring the book back to print. Remember though that the press is an amazing one and they do incredible work. So in no way is this a witch hunt. We just want to show interest in what they once did too.

For more on Botho Strauss click here.

Lost Books Month: Found Books - Melville House's Hans Fallada

“All my life long I have fed on people,” a young Fallada wrote, “I have storied them in my mind with their ways of moving, speaking, feeling, and now I have them there, ready for instant use. Nothing has ever interested me so much as the realization why people behave as they do. My otherwise hopeless memory is excellent for each detail, the most trivial facts I learn about the habits of my fellow man.”

- Hans Fallada

June is Lost Books month here on the Devil's Accountant and with the new Front List/Back List format I have decided to use Mondays throughout June to feature titles by publishers who have resuscitated lost books.

Today I am featuring three books published by that fine firm from Brooklyn.

Melville House's Hans Fallada

The question of how Hans Fallada went Out-Of-Print in the US and other English language countries is a somewhat disconcerting one. His writing should have been influential, perhaps immensely so, as it contains elements of what would be hailed by later generations in the writings of Franz Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz and to some degree even Vladimir Nabokov. Perhaps the one difference (and it is much to Fallada's credit) is that Fallada wrote with more tooth, more political claw and fang, than those other names above. Sure, he could be as obliquely humorous as Kafka or as outrageously slapstick as Gomrbowicz, but he did so in front of the horrid backdrop of German fascism and with a steadying rudder of realism.

Hans Fallada is the nome de plume of Rudolph Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen. He took the name Fallada in order to insulate his respected father from the implications of his fiction’s matter-of-fact dealings with life on the down and out. The name Fallada is taken from the horse Falada of the classic German fairy tale, The Goose Girl (Grimm’s Fairy Tales has a definitive telling).

Over the last two years Melville House has republished Fallada's writings with additional informative materials and in stunning new translations. The diversity of appeal and memorable nature of Fallada's writings is such that at once I thank (as a reader) Melville House for bringing the books back to life and ask (as a critic) how did it happen that these books were gone from our shelves for decades.

The important thing is of course that they are back on them now.

Here are three of Fallada's books issued by Melville House. Others can be found on their website.


Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. Translated by Michael Hofmann. Fiction. ISBN: 1935554042. 544 pps. $16.95.


from Melville House's website...

"The greatest book ever writtten about German resistance to the Nazis."

- Primo Levi

This rediscovered masterpiece, lost after World War II, was translated for the first time into English last year by Melville House and became one of the most acclaimed books of the year.

It presents a rich detailed portrait of life in Berin under the Nazis and tells a sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand against the Nazis when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campagin that soon has enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a world of terrified neighbors and cynical snitches ready to turn them in.

In the end, it's more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order-it's a deeply moving story of two people who stand up for what's right, and for each other.

The Drinker by Hans Fallada. Translated by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd. Afterword by John Willet. Melville House. ISBN: 9781933633657. 304 pp. $16.95.


from a March of 2009 Devil's Accountant post...

Fallada’s early works were received by the Nazis as critiques of the Wiemar Republic. In reality Fallada described a poverty that exists in any place or time, and in his harsh treatment of communists the Nazis overlooked his equally critical comments on fascism. Joseph Goebbels forced him at one point to write an anti-Semitic (or at least anti-Weimar) tract. Fallada resisted, but in time he caved under the increasing pressure. Following this caving Fallada was never quite the same. The reliance on alcohol for escape and the admission of cowardice when confronted with a dire situation were things that Fallada perhaps shared with his quintessential drunkard, Erwin Sommer.

Admission of cowardice is no easy thing. Even harder is rendering it as a lesson. Like the horse in the old fairy tale, Fallada to the end lived to unmask treachery with his words.

The Drinker was one of Fallada's last works and certainly one that was written at the height of Nazi power. It is however a brilliant rumination on of urfascism and the minutiae of a society journeying toward the inhumane.




Wolf Among Wolves (published 2010) by Hans Fallada. Based on a contemporaneous translation by Philip Owens that has been revised and restored in full by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs. Afterword by Thorsten Carstensen. Fiction. Melville House. Trade paperback. ISBN: 1933633921. 816 pps. $18.95.


From Melville House's website...

Wolf Among Wolves is a sprawling saga of the collapse of a culture--its economy and government--and the common man's struggle to survive it all. Set in Weimar Germany soon after Germany's catastrophic loss of World War I, the story follows a young gambler who loses all in Berlin, then flees the chaotic city, where worthless money and shortages are causing pandemonium. Once in the countryside, however, he finds a defeated German army that has deamped there to foment insurrection. Somehow, amidst it all, he finds romance--it's The Year of Living Dangerously in a European setting.

Fast-moving as a thriller, fascinating as the best historical fiction, and with lyrical prose that packs a powerful emotional punch, Wolf Among Wolves is the equal of Fallada's acclaimed Every Man Dies Alone as an immensely absorbing work of important literature.

That, my cultured friends, is what preservation is about.

Lost Books Month: The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

"A complex tragic masterpiece... John Brunner is the Rachel Carson of science fiction."

-Ian Watson

First published in 1972 The Sheep Look Up is not currently a lost book. It has been OOP before and after some investigation into its availability from major and minor retailers I have come to the conclusion that it is once again teetering on unavailability. This is something that should not be.

Let me first praise the publisher of the current edition, BenBella Books. Their 2003 republication of this sci-fi classic is a wonderful production. From David Brin's Foreword to the very current and politically motivated Afterword by James John Bell, the BenBella edition is superb.

And still in print, according to the BenBella website.

So why why did I give it the nod for Lost Books Month? Because you can't walk into a Barnes & Noble and order a copy (except for the slipcase special edition signed by Brin for $200) let alone find one on a shelf. Because it isn't available from several book wholesalers and most importantly because it is incredibly exigent to our times once again, a thing that perhaps is both sad and good.

Sad because of the apathetic approach to a catastrophic oil spill (Is pumping oil into the sea really still just a spill?) that will without a doubt wreak nearly permanent damage to the ecosystems of the Gulf and perhaps even Florida Keys and Caribbean beyond. Sad because a decade of pro-business environmental policies have left tuna schools once again loaded with mercury and acid rain again making appearance.

Good, perhaps, because there are works like Brunner's that can auger the dreadful trajectory of our times.

So, let's dust off this noble book and let it do what it can. Namely scare you in a way you thought previously impossible.


The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. Foreword by David Brin and Afterword by James John Bell. Science Fiction. BenBella Books. Trade Paperback. 388 pps. ISBN: 1932100016. $15.95. Buy it at BenBella Books to support the publisher.

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.

-from "Lycidas" by John Milton

It's a bad day in LA when you forget your gas mask and the corner drugstore's oxygen machine is on the fritz. The day gets worse when the coughing forces you to take a drink from an unfiltered water fountain. Straight tap water. You might as well go ahead and set aside the three or so hours you will spend on the toilet later.

This is a rare sort of book. Many of the things critics and writers have said about it make it seem to be more akin to the prophecies of Nostradamus than the writings of Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. It is though, more closely related to the latter authors. It's just that in The Sheep Look Up we have a truly prescient book.

So prescient, in fact, that David Brin describes it as a "self-preventing prophecy" in his Foreword to the current BenBella edition. The book's dubious history of being Out-Of-Print or a "cult classic" is somewhat explained in its success in changing the world.

Not many books can claim such a feat. Perhaps this is why they are still in print. A joke, sort of.

Published exactly a decade after Rachel Carson's landmark environmental text, Brunner's book is quite worthy of comparison to the seminal Silent Spring. I do not say this lightly. The Sheep Look Up is a book of horrific implication and truly capable of changing perception.

It is also a brilliantly plotted novel. Brief episodic chapters catapult the reader around the world and into a not too distant future where the Earth can no longer contain or control the toxins we've been pumping out for decades. Tap water will give you a considerable stomach ache. Too much time in the open air without a gas mask will give you smoker's cough and a gravelly voice. Not to mention what the genetically modified non-food is doing to you...

Realistically speaking it is a future that we could very easily and probably will be familiar with in our lifetimes. Forget the future generation stuff.

Brunner's novel is prescient because of the environmental trajectory it speaks of. It is important, and relevant, because of the economic and political realities it is aware of. Some have said that the world of America during the Bush presidency is just one more of the Brunner prophecies but I disagree with this notion. It is too easy a folly to place such a weight on one decade. The reality is that the economics of disaster have been in place for a long time and are humming along quite nicely.

Brunner's world is one where large corporations manipulate the representative government through bribes and campaign contributions. Manufacturing companies have sought to stave off pollution reform, quite successfully, and the pharmaceutical industry has made a killing on drugs designed to repel and dispel the nasty side-effects of a thoroughly toxic world.

Not to mention the lucrative filtration business. Buy stock in gas mask manufacturers and in particular water filtration/logistics companies. It will pay off sooner than you'd like.

The world of The Sheep Look Up is our own. Politically. Economically. And soon ecologically as well. In classic sci-fi fashion there is a beautiful woman and a band of scientific do-gooders that seek to fight the machine of death that society has become.

While I know as a fact that beautiful women still inhabit our planet, I am somewhat more dubious as to whether we'll benefit from a hero such as Austin Train from The Sheep Look Up. Who wants to live a life on the run from authorities and corporate goons when you could just collect a nice check from Pfizer instead?

The sound of crickets.

Booksellers: Order a copy for your store. Readers: Buy a copy from your local bookstore or at BenBella Books. That's how you keep a book from becoming lost.

About The Author

John Brunner via Wikipedia.

Lost Books Month: A User's Guide

Yes, that is in fact a spiraling abyss of books. Check it out at BookLust.

As I was sitting down to put together the first book profile of the second annual Lost Books Month I realized that an introduction might be in order. The number of readers of this blog has grown considerably in 2010 and many may be unaware of the purpose of this month.

Rather than append this intro to the first book (and make one of those gigantic posts I'm guilty from time to time) I decided to do this introduction on its own. The first book will go up tomorrow.

Last year I humbly put forward the idea of a lost books awareness month and proceeded to review a series of titles that fit into that notion. So just what is a lost book?

I am defining a lost book as one that is either Out-Of-Print, teetering on Out-Of-Print status, under translated (see quote below), or even a book that is not available in a reliable edition.

Mostly the notion of "lost" will concern itself with OOP titles. As to the translation concept, here is a quote from last year's inaugural post.

Un-translated: Tell us about any book in a language that is unavailable in another language. Is there somehow a Steinbeck novel unavailable in Japanese and you’d like to see it translated? How about a brilliant North African novel written in French, yet never translated into the English. Let alone all those Peruvian novellas without a home (I am assuming they exist).

Basically, I am asking for participation from readers, writers and publishers. There is a diverse international readership to this blog now and I'd love to hear about some books that we are not aware of in the States.

So please feel free to get involved. I'd love to post reviews or comments on lost books. Due to the new format to the site I will be splitting the Front List from the Back List all month long. The Back List titles will all be "Lost Books" and will go up on Wednesdays.

Spread the word. If you are a blogger or writer and do something on your own site about Lost Books Month tag it such and let me know that you've done so.

Front List / Back List Part I: The Front List Featuring...Barnes & Noble?

Is the Accountant really going to say something nice about this place? Sort of.

Et tu Devil's Accountant?

Sort of. I founded this blog to promote and feature good works throughout the literary sphere and when I learned recently about a very proactive approach by B&N to sell academic books I had to put my money where my mouth was.

Incidentally I did not have to remove my foot.

This week's Front List / Back List is a two part affair. This is mainly to allow for a somewhat expanded review of the Back List title which goes up tomorrow. Also, because today's post is somewhat more of a commentary on the book business than a review of a book I felt a bit of separation was necessary.

Also tomorrow's post will be the first of Lost Books Month. The second annual Lost Books Month, that is.

Let's get to it.

Barnes & Noble's Big Insight

Those of you that haunt bookstores will no doubt have come upon Oxford's Very Short Introduction series at some point. They're the small trade paperbacks with the lateral bands of color and the names of respected thinkers beside the brief title. It's an introductory series that Oxford launched to increase awareness in lay readers concerning typically austere subjects like say economics or Anglicanism (okay, so that was kind of a joke).

Being somewhat of an autodidact I have always had a soft spot for the introductory work. They can be wonderful tools to round out your knowledge or a launching point for deeper investigation.

There is no questioning the importance of the series. These are leading scholars climbing out of their ivory tower cloisters and writing for a larger audience.

Personally I've read and enjoyed three of the series. Christopher Butler's Postmodernism, Frank Close's The Void (a literal and literary look at that most essential of life's realities: non-being) and in particular Partha Dasgupta's Economics. I can personally recommend all three and all three are availble below via...Powell's.

Now... Just what does Barnes & Noble have to do with this?

B&N, whose institution I am an alumnus of, has repackaged the series as A Brief Insight under their Sterling Publishing imprint. Sterling was acquired by B&N in 2003 with what amounted to only mild controversy. B&N, mind you, has had its run-ins with antitrust law. Most of these scraps have concerned the retail giant's distribution and publishing acquisitions.

B&N launched the refurbished series this year with additional images and illustrations in an inexpensive and snappy hardcover. Instead of inexpensive read, "Printed in China" and instead of snappy read, "Ripped off Routledge's blue trade paperback binding style."

The average price of the B&N edition is in the mid teens and, get this, is "buy one get one free" at a Barnes & Noble.

No joke.

These are the same titles as issued in the Oxford series only slightly retitled and illustrated. Prominently displayed on a Barnes & Noble end cap and at a ridiculously low price or essentially $6 to $7 a pop the series is now both accessible from a cost and intellectual standpoint.

The indie bookseller in me wants to say that it's not fair. The businessman in me wants to say that it is a clever retail strategy. The bibliophile / critic in me wants to say that it is a wonderful way to spread knowledge and keep a innovative series alive and kicking.

So how about those three things: indie bookseller, business and critic. Let me expand on the three.

Indie Bookseller

This is what you are up against. Not only are the internet retailers and big top stores strangling you with a new electronic format that you are 100% excluded from being involved in but they can also do something like this in your back yard.

Barnes & Noble is offering a unique item at a insanely low price. Sure, it's as fair as life is but you know how that adage goes. The only way this is unfair from a legal / institutional way is if B&N is selling products like these at cost or sub-cost in order to push more rivals over the edge.

In that case I would say that B&N's current distribution and publishing capabilities when combined with their retail market share may have crossed certain antitrust lines.

Incidentally, the books in B&N's reissue are available to any bookseller. They can be ordered wholesale, as far as I can tell, at discount and sold in your own bookstore.

Just not "buy one get one" which of course doesn't discount the notion of monopoly.


Book Business

The decision to obtain limited rights to sell books like Oxford's series through their bargain publishing companies is pure marketing genius. Such pricing and packaging is designed to beat Amazon's insanely aggressive e-book pricing and bolster the reputation of Barnes & Noble's physical retail arm (it used to be called a bookstore).

The more B&N does projects like the repackaging of such literary minded series the better off the future of their bookstores will be. When standing in front of the display I had to tip my hat to it. The books are really nice. And cheap. You should check them out if you don't mind the tenebrous implications that the "Printed in China" label might hold.

Critic

Good job, B&N. You've done something to promote a populist series of educational books and made them extremely accessible from a cost standpoint.

It of course doesn't make up for that sham of a poetry section you have at the Valley Forge location.

Remember to tune in tomorrow as I kick off the second annual Lost Books Month with a tale of ecological horror.

The Books Mentioned


Economics: A Brief Insight by Partha Dasgupta. Sterling Publishing (Barnes & Noble). Economics. Hardcover. 213 pps. ISBN: 9781402768941. $14.95.




The Void: A Brief Insight by Frank Close. Sterling Publishing (Barnes & Noble). Science. Hardcover. 182 pps. ISBN: 9781402775383. $14.95.




Postmodernism: A Brief Insight by Christopher Butler. Art Criticism. Sterling Publishing. 186 pps. ISBN: 9781402768804. $9.95.