Front List / Back List: The Bars Of Atlantis by Durs Grunbein and Ashes For Breakfast by, well, Durs Grunbein

All Grunbein all the time. Or at least for this post and a forthcoming one.

Today we have two books by the great German writer, Durs Grunbein, whose fame and influence has unfortunately lived outside of the United States for quite some time. Fortunately that is a problem coming to an end.

Grunbein has racked up the awards in Germany, including the nation's most prestigious award, the Georg Buchner Prize. The front list book today is the first collection of essays by Grunbein translated into English and was published this year. The second book, or back list title, is the only previous book of Grunbein's writings to be rendered into English. It is the 2005 collection of poetry titled Ashes For Breakfast.

So who is Durs Grunbein? Let's just put it this way: If you want to finally read the works of the next Nobel Prize winner before they win the prize instead of being left to scratch your head and ask, "Who?" well, then Durs Grunbein is as good a writer as any to bet on.

Okay, let's shelve the cheesy proclamations and get on with it.

From The Front List


The Bars Of Atlantis by Durs Grunbein. Edited and Introduced by Michael Eskin. Translated by John Crutchfield, Michael Hofmann and Andrew Shields. Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780374260620. 323 pps. $35.

Perfectly natural that he should feel a little giddiness, coupled with a sudden sense of his own tininess. This is not to extenuate or justify, but it may be one of the reasons for the metaphor that now abruptly surfaces, put by the author in the place where it will get most attention: at the end. "There in the transit lounge," you may read:

Where downtime remains conscious to no end,
The proverb from the bars of Atlantis swims
into ken:

Travel is a foretaste of Hell.

-from the title essay in The Bars Of Atlantis

The snippet of verse that closes the above quote is taken from one of Grunbein's most famous poems, "Cosmopolite." The word, and the concept of such a station, is one of the recurring themes in Grubein's extremely diverse writings and he bestows upon the station of cosmopolite a sort of metaphysical/scientific hybrid status. A form of Tolkien's "Not all who wander are lost" sentiment.

Grunbein is no fantasist however, far from it really, and to peg him as one thing or the other is somewhat difficult. Above all others, the most singular trait that one can find in all of Grunbein's poems and essays is that he is both curious and earnest. This of course also implies that he is quite charming as a writer.

Born in the German Democratic Republic, Grunbein's formative years, and early adulthood, were subject (are poets ever truly subjects?) to the freeze and thaw of soviet communism. The backdrop of the destruction of Germany at the end of WWII and the coming totalitarianism of the Soviet Union are but two of Grunbein's influences. The thawing and dismantling of East vs. West when the Berlin Wall came down opened up a whole new world of investigations.

The saturation bombing and destruction of Dresden in WWII awakens a fascination with Pompeii and Herculaneum beneath the ashes of Vesuvius. The scientific thrust of Georg Buchner's mind creates a demand in his own for a catalog of sea creatures, a parable of hatchetfish and bristlemouths. The fall of the Berlin wall and the ensuing travel liberties become a station, replete with responsibilities. Above all there is the myth of Atlantis. A sort of all-encompassing vision of timeless destruction and loss and the impetus to discover and journey all at once.

To me there is no collection of essays quite like one written by a poet. There is nothing of the all-too seriousness of Giacomo Leopardi in Grubein's essays and yet there is a similar approach and elevation of the language that made me look to my copy of the Pensieri.

There is a certain audacity in the language of a poet writing essays. Perhaps none more than Grunbein, who in one of the more entertaining pieces crafts a poetic fax sent from the future to one Lord Chandos. The essay is in free verse and only the stodgiest of commentators would be bothered by this.

The collection's title essay "The Bars Of Atlantis" moves easily from question to subject and covers a startling amount of ground. Grunbein evokes one of the essential ideas of his life, that of the worldly man, his cosmopolite, and demonstrates the manner in which he has behaved once having reached that status. Earnestly, mind you, as despite the moments when Grunbein seems to nearly be bragging you never have the sense that he is doing so. His recounting of his first experiences scuba diving are suddenly softened when he succumbs to anthropomorphizing a circle of small prawns on the sea floor. Gathered around them by the dive instructor, human and crustacean mirror each other in a pair of councils that the German poet cannot but connect to some primordial implications.

Yes, by "bars" he is in fact referring to drinking establishments. In particular a transit lounge somewhere in Atlantis before returning to the world above. I wonder what kind of exotic booze they have down there.

Grunbein's essays are for everyone and that is perhaps what is so frustrating about their somewhat sluggish arrival into English. He is here now and like I implied at the beginning of this post: you would do well to read him.

From The Back List


Ashes For Breakfast: Selected Poems by Durs Grunebein. Translated from the German and prefaced by Michael Hofmann. Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 9780374530136. 320 pps. $16.

It was second nature to me to turn the music up, and softly hum
The Two or three lines that were sufficient to put the country
Under water. As I embarked on my sentimental journey
Through nettle fields and villages, the other way to the general exodus,
The sergeant's Russian bawl: "Dawai, dawai!" was still ringing in my ear.
Nostalgia's falsetto recommended something exotic before you hand in
Your dinner pail. What say the Hawaiian beaches?

-from "Vita Brevis" by Durs Grunbein

As a poet, Grunbein is extremely hard to pin down. There is a classicism to his poetry, a certain willingness to quote or invite classical personages in and what translator Michael Hofmann has dubbed the "marble" in it. Yet there is nothing pedantic, Poundian or romantic about the inclusion.

There is a political awareness especially seen in his earliest poems. Yet the tank smashed sardines in "A Single Tin" are not outright arguments or tear-filled protests. That which is engage in Grubein exists as more of a tragic exposition than polemical outrage.

The poet he is most often compared to is the Russian, Joseph Brodsky. There is also a similar scientific bent, which calls to mind the contemporaneous poetry of August Kleinzahler. There is also something of the absurd juxtaposition of life on both sides of a coin that exists between these two poets. In Grubein's case, these observations are often delivered with a particularly sincere brand of irony.

That which is scientific or biological in Grubein's writing probably has more to do with the neuroscience of Georg Buchner than Kleinzahler's inclusion of flea anatomy.

Ashes For Breakfast was the first collection of Grubein to arrive in the English language, thanks to the careful work of translator and poet Michael Hofmann. Hofmann selected and edited the collection as well, taking from Grunbein's representative works and organizing it in chronological fashion.

Hofmann mentions the prolific nature of Grubein as a writer. From essays to poetry, he creates at a rate that far outstrips his adept translator(s). There is now somewhat of a push to translate more of the great German's writing, with two titles arriving this year (I'll review the other soon enough).

To me, a purely English speaking/reading person, this literary terra incognita demonstrates the profundity of translation. Like Grunbein's Atlantis, there is an immensity of potential knowledge that is alluded to by those who know (Plato/Hofmann) and yet wholly removed from our access.

So thank the translators whenever you can.

I Am Not My Bookstore? You Are Your Bookstore.

First let me apologize for failing to do a Front List/Back List post this week. I'm busy, busy man these days with lots of change on the horizon. I promise to have one Monday.

Pushing that public service announcement to the side, please allow me to explain what I'm about to address.

A little over two weeks ago Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical company posted a, well, logical assessment of just what the book industry might look like in 2015. It's grim in many ways but mainly because Shatzkin's post is well-reasoned and drawn from trajectories set forward by leading book industry professionals.

The post is titled "Where Will Bookstores Be Five Years From Now" and approaches the brick-and-mortar bookstore from four main vantage points. The two major views are from the bookstore itself, namely big top stores (Barnes & Noble we're pointing at you) and smaller independent stores. The other two approaches are concerning large and small publishers and how they will impact the places where their books are sold. I highly recommend anyone even vaguely curious about where the industry is headed to read this insightful piece.

The grim protagonist of Shatzkin's post is the e-book and its dire implications. Taking the conservative estimates set forward by the CEOs of large publishers, Shatskin paints a picture of a world where printed books will have lost at least 50% sales to the electronic format (I agree 100% with Mr. Shatzkin that these estimates are probably too conservative).

The eventuality being portrayed is one that can already be seen and felt in bookstores now. It is one of diminishing retail space dedicated to books and an increasing push to compete in the electronic markets. Barnes & Noble is currently engaged in expanding their educational products, toys and gaming sections in order to offset eventual (or current?) losses in print book sales. Overnight shelf-moving shifts and large scale returns packaging is currently going on at B&Ns everywhere. I have friends that are on the ground floor of this process and it is one that unsettles them as much as it makes their arms sore.

The new look to the one-time 800 lbs gorilla is of course disconcerting to literary Luddites everywhere. B&N is trying to deleverage themselves from printed books and soften those losses with sales from expanded non-book channels and their cherished big great hope, the nook e-reader. What a name...

Shatzkin goes on to comment on the difficulties that large publishers like Random House or Macmillan will have in marketing and maintaining their multitude of titles in an increasingly electronic market. He goes so far as to say that the diminishing of Random House will lead to the diminishing of big-top stores and so on in return.

The fact is he's right. Programs like B&N's pay-to-display Topps program and whatever manifestation it exists as today will go by the wayside and suddenly it won't be as lucrative for B&N to display the next Dr. Phil book. Let alone manufacture a bestseller by ordering it by the ton.

Apparently there are things that print-loving pedants will one day thank e-books for.

So as you can seee, I'm all aboard Shatzkin's post. Until this.

We know Google harbors the hope that they can provide meaningful inclusion for independents in the ebook marketplace. But even if Google’s efforts are successful, they don’t support the independent store, they support the store owner. There is a difference.

It comes amidst a rosy optimism about opportunities for independent stores, and also indie publishers, to navigate these suddenly wide seas while the big guys struggle to stay afloat. Insert here: Sir Francis Drake and his English privateers versus the suddenly vulnerable galleons of the Spanish armada and other apropos historical metaphors.

This might be true but it is not as easy as all that. As readers (you know - those noble souls who are at the heart of this entire discussion) increasingly go digital with their purchasing it will become incredibly hard to convince them that a $24.99 hardcover is somehow better than a $12.99 e-book. Let alone if its Amazon running the show at ten bucks a pop.

So small publishers and bookstores can be as savvy and niche oriented as they want but as readers continually go to the new format it will matter less and less. Sure, you might have an awesome deal selling kids books to three area schools but when the school goes digital and you are excluded from the format, well, then the teardrops start.

Currently the exclusivity of e-book technology and sales channels (Amazon via Amazon/B&N via B&N) is one that threatens the little bookstore in an incredible way. You may have lived your whole indie bookselling life shaking a fist at the big stores but you will die with them and the only key to an afterlife is finding inclusion in some sort of electronic bookselling. Of course this all presupposes a world where e-books rule.

Again, the quote at hand.

But even if Google’s efforts are successful, they don’t support the independent store, they support the store owner. There is a difference.

When I was co-owner of Wolfgang Books my business partner Jason Hafer and I were Wolfgang Books. If either of us had hit the lottery then we'd probably still be working together. Alas we did not hit any lotteries despite all best attempts to do so. The reality is that Wolfgang Books, though an award winning success, could not support two salaries at the time I decided to leave.

Wolfgang Books ceased to be Jason and I and instead became Jason and his wife Rachelle. Well, metaphysically speaking it became a part of their essence, the outcome of their existence, etc, etc.

Anyone reading this that owns a small bookstore, or press for that matter, knows that you are your business. If you are truly lucky, or perhaps uber-talented, then you might have arrived at the enlightened point where other creative individuals like employees or advisers can create a direction for your business but lets be honest: that concept probably scares you a little.

It probably seems like somewhat superficial nitpicking, but to say that a sales channel that creates wealth for a bookstore's owner, let alone under the umbrella of the company they own, is somehow not going to always benefit the business itself is not only wrong it is in this case dangerously so.

Point blank: If small bookstores like Wolfgang Books are barred from ever engaging in retailing the dominant format (in this case the e-book) then they are going to have a very, very hard time scrapping it out with the big boys that control the format. Andrew Laties, of Rebel Bookseller fame (among others) jokingly summed up his series of engaged comments to Shatzkin's post with this:

For the past several days I've been vociferously commenting on a fascinating blogpost. Industry expert Mike Shatzkin believes that the rapid rise of eBooks will depress print-book sales so much that chain storefronts will not be able to continue to operate profitably. He thinks that a very large number of superstore locations will close. He is principally concerned about this because he thinks that the major publishing companies will be seriously damaged. However in a number of exchanges with him, in the comments section of his blog, I was able to elicit the opinion that unusual, quirky, creative and talented independent booksellers might be able to continue to operate bookstores during the coming eBook revolution, even if the large general bookstore corporations were in dire straits.

My conclusion here is fairly obvious. I won the war!

Laties is joking, or I hope he is at least, but the reality is that if Barnes & Noble is shutting its doors and going virtual because of a complete sea change in format, well, then that does not bode well for Laties and the privateer's doors either.

I mean no disrespect to Shatzkin's post. It is one of the better brass tacks sort of posts around. To be honest, I'm more or less expanding on one side note he made. It's just that I think that any booksellers reading it would do well to take somewhat different advice when it comes to countering the eventualities being described. Or at least not engage in a shrugging of shoulders when it comes time to address the potential of a Google e-books platform.

If e-books become the reader's choice then the road to success, or subsistence, for small bookstores and publishers will involve a hand-in-hand approach to e-books. The small stores like Wolfgang Books in Phoenixville, PA or Greenlight in Brooklyn, NY will need to have access to electronic sales, and the publishers whose works they chose to sell will have to provide them with electronic versions to sell.

The thing that seems interesting to me as a former bookseller, is that for some reason people seem to think one will exclude the other. There's no reason that I can see that a great bookseller like Jason Hafer will not be able to build a solid online following to go along with the remarkable space that is his brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Just don't forget that I stained and drilled all those bookshelves, Jason.

Basically I'm saying to all indie stores: start preparing to sell e-books. Hoping that someone like Google comes to the rescue might be a bit risky, naive or just plain lazy but at this point in the game it might be all you've got.

Front List/ Back List: The Canal by Lee Rourke and Michel De Montaigne's Essays

This is perhaps the oddest pairing yet put forward within the framework of Front List/Back List. It is in that sense also one of the comparisons I've most enjoyed making.

Please let me explain for those of you new to the site. Front List/Back List posts are regularly occurring on the DA. In these posts I review both a new release and an older title. The older (back list) title can relate to a current event, cultural trend or in the case of today's choice: the front list title itself.

On the surface the two books today are unrelated. Possibly even philosophically opposed. One is seemingly a Neo-Beat novel seasoned with punk rock sensibilities while the other is a collection of writings by a master that would come to define an entire form. One is of today and the other, at its finest, is of all time.

So let's have at this tenuous but supposedly interesting comparison. As always we start with the Front List.

From The Front List


The Canal by Lee Rourke. Fiction. Melville House Publishing. Trade paperback. 199 pps. ISBN: 9781935554011. $14.95

It seems that boredom is not really that removed from desire. It seems that they are, in fact, the same urge more or less: the urge to do something. It seems that the same common denominator underpins them: existence. And existence is essentially prolonged boredom. Desire is boredom. These urges remain with us even when the body begins to deteriorate. When the body is past its best these urges still seem to remain. They remain until the last breath. We are driven by urges we can't really explain. None of it can be explained. This, it seems to me at last, is the sheer beauty of boredom, and, more importantly, existence: It is all-powerful, more powerful than anything we can imagine.

-from The Canal

So then we are condemned to be free and suffer a hell populated with other people and our desires of/for them. No, I am not mashing Sartre quotes together in order to mock, but rather to set a stage. In any case, the book begins with an epigraph from Heidegger and there's no way I'd ever mix those two jars of oil and water.

Sorry. That was a bad analogy in these BP tainted times.

There is validity in the superficial comparisons made between Rourke's writing and that of the Beat generation. There is also some truth to the descriptions of his settings as having a sort of punk air about them. Please just don't ask me to explain what the latter means. It usually leads to arguments. If you need further evidence just look at this set list for the novel composed by the author.

Rourke's interest in the written image of dialog and even narrative technique as repetitive form can certainly call to mind aspects of concrete poetry and something of the Kipling-Hemingway-Kerouac strand of the literary genetic sequence. That's about where it ends though. In The Canal form serves function and that function is to communicate the profundity of boredom.

The Canal is the tale of a man who finds himself suddenly capable of taking life by the reigns and fully engaging his boredom. Yes. His boredom. Luckily the beneficiary of a decent inheritance, he quits his job and takes up station on a park bench overlooking a somewhat murky canal in need of a thorough dredging. From this vantage point he beholds and catalogs the many different planes passing overhead, reflects upon the gentle waterfowl and waxes voyeur with the daily affairs of office workers that play out in the building across the waterway. This is but the setting.

The novel steadily builds a multi-layered tension surrounding the other human inhabitants, all also bored, who frequent the canal. In time the plot even begins to resemble Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", replete with undiscovered homicide and the threat of physical harm. Yet despite these violent and dreadful histories of the equally bored cohabitants of the canal, the man maintains his slightly more engaged brand of boredom.

This is, at long last, a real novel of ideas. Something that does not come around as often as it should.

The strength of the novel, and much should be said in praise of Rourke for this, is that it never devolves into foolishness, slapstick or petulance. Instead of playing with boredom as schtick it addresses it head on and without the typical prescribed curatives at the end. No, the profound boredom of Rourke's protagonist requires replication and not treatment. For Rourke and his loitering man, boredom is enlightenment, or at least a heightened awareness of the core of who and what he is, that is to say his being. Lucky for us it's already endemic.

Despite at times seeming to possess a level of tension that can be found only in the best of horror writing, the novel never succumbs to any of the potential pitfalls set forth in its plot. Instead of real devilry we are to encounter the protagonist's pseudo-philosophical musings on society and life in general. All of them delivered with a firm conviction that would have made Sartre proud. Instead of a veritable cast of Saint Anthony's demons we find topical assessment of subjects like love, death and responsibility, which are perhaps demons more grim yet.

The Canal is a rigorously thoughtful book, where exposition serves to inform the ideas and musings of the author. It is existentialist in the same way that the novels and short stories of Sartre and Camus were. Such philosophically engaged writing is rare in fiction today, let alone in a novel as accessible and intriguing as The Canal. This is achieved in part by the compartmentalization of the more philosophical musings, which often provide relief from the tense and often dark plot that is unfolding.

This brings me to the back list...

From The Back List


The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters by Michel De Montaigne. Translated by Donald Frame. Introduction by Stuart Hampshire. Essays. Everyman's Library. Hardcover. 1336 pps. ISBN: 1400040213. $30.

I am one of those freest from this passion. I neither like it nor respect it, although everyone has decided to honor it, as if at a fixed price, with particular favor. They clothe wisdom, virtue, conscience with it: a stupid and monstrous ornament! The Italians, more appropriately, have baptized malignancy with its name. For it always a harmful quality, always insane; and, as being always cowardly and base, the Stoics forbid the sages to feel it.

Montaigne,"Of Sadness"

There are perhaps several books where the comparisons could have been easier to make. Let alone less combative.

The foggy, guilt-ridden waterways of Amsterdam in Camus' The Fall might be better at more immediate comparison. Jean-Paul Sartre's study of shiftless characters who fail to address their own boredom in The Age Of Reason would have been easily done as well. I thought briefly about the hobbyhorses and eternally inward digression of Laurence Sterne's masterwork The Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy but found the style and effect too different. Herman Melville's Bartelby, The Scrivener would perhaps have the closest ties and yet...

Nope.

Instead I want to call attention to Michel De Montaigne, father of the essay and a man who despised idleness on principal and yet was an admitted benefactor of this dreadful disease.

It seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. But I find that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.

-"Of Idleness"

Zing and counter zing.

In Rourke's novel the boredom of the protagonist serves as a catalyst for profound inquiries made within and without, each of them born of a topical realization made from observed phenomena. These inquiries are housed within brief asides that could nearly stand alone as essays. The man in Rourke's book is a thinker and he has found himself best equipped to do so when thoroughly and incurably bored.

No one had written like Montaigne before he crafted his essays. There is a great sense of ease and reflection that exists in his diverse writings that can't help but be felt by the reader. It is something that is not readily found in writings before the Essays and to a large degree is lacking in modern writing.

In essence I am saying that Montaigne and his Essays were born of the very same boredom that Rourke seeks to expound upon in his novel. There is a feeling to them that is very similar.

Please understand that I am not comparing Rourke's protagonist's musings with those of Montaigne. Nor am I claiming some insight into either author's mind. For one the format of fiction has its limits when it comes to didacticism. Still, there is something to the man sitting there on a park bench thinking in an organized, orderly manner that reminded me instantly of the impression one gets of the French master at his own table or amidst some ambulatory pontificating.

And that's basically it. A sort of incidental moment, born of boredom, creates similar musings in two very different cases, places and times (I am referring to Rourke and not his protagonist of course). Basically I wanted to go metaphysical with the association between the two books today, as that seemed apropos.

I am not going to waste your time with a review of the Essays either. They are essential reading and a review of them is more fittingly housed in an academic title. I am however going to say that in them you will find something less than stuffy, something born of a writer who had the leisure, perhaps the boredom, to set down the subjective chimeras born of his idle mind.

They are nice companion readings for a novel about boredom.

Lost Books Month- The Dark Dancer by Balachandra Rajan

Come on publishers, let's bring Mr. Rajan back to print.

I know. The month is over. I made the mistake of trying to obtain the movie based on the book featured today and failed to get the post up during the month of June. I still haven't procured the film yet. Any advice on this would be welcome.

This Friday I will return to doing the Week In Books posts and next week will go back to Monday Front List/Back List posts. I just wanted to fit this last lost book in, as it is perhaps the most merited one featured this month.


The Dark Dancer by Balachandra Rajan. Fiction. Simon and Schuster. 1958. Hardcover. 308 pps. Out-Of-Print.

Paradox, contradiction, miracle - they were the barriers to which explanation was drive. But at least in that hypnotic figure the paradox was a radiance in one's senses, the intense union of power with tranquility, not captured but liberated in that eternal dancing. And the miracle was not that of a single individual's unrepeatable insight, Ozymandias lost beneath the seventh city, there to be disinterred by the sure hands of Blenkinstauffer and placed in the great vestibule for millions to gape on, by courtesy of fruit juice and vanadium and even your best friends wouldn't dare to tell you. Again and again, century after century, thousands of times in city or village, the molten metal would settle into solidity and the craftsman gazing upon it would feel the strange light of a vision not his own. Feel it perhaps in parched earth and prowling jungle, in the marriage drums of the sea's far-off thunder, tranquility where the surf breaks, in the cave of loneliness with the glaciers grinding. Creation, Destruction. Two concepts but one dance, the trampling leg, the out-thrust arms asserting the law invincibly, ecstatically, the drums beating, the strings plucked in supplicating monotony, raise me, raise me into the mystery's center; for something to be born something must die.

-from The Dark Dancer, in a scene where the author describes the duality of the Nataraja, Shiva as Lord Of The Dance and the traditional bronze idols made in his likeness.

Salman Rushdie evokes a similar sentiment in the beginning of his scandalous classic, The Satanic Verses. Actually, he quite directly writes a line similar to the final one of the above paragraph written by Rajan. I'm not implying anything scandalous by pointing that out. Rushdie is a master and the line is, to some degree, a cliche in the parlance of reincarnation metaphysics. Still, there are other similarities between the writings of Rushdie and the lost novels of Balachandra Rajan.

Rajan was a somewhat unlikely novelist. He was the Professor Emeritus of English at the University Of Ontario and his career is mostly remembered for his studies on Milton. He was an academic first and that rarely bodes well for creative endeavors.

Rajan was also a political dabbler, being at the time of The Dark Dancer's publication the representative of India to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Rajan died in 2009 at the age of 89. Both of his novels, critically acclaimed in their day, are out of print and have been for some time.

Written in 1958 The Dark Dancer tips its hat toward the espionage fiction of Graham Greene to some degree but maintains a voice and energy that is extremely independent. Greene's impression can be sensed in the subplots concerning the protagonist's love triangle and the machinations of petty bureaucrats operating in the limbo of Indian government just prior to the partitioning and eventual Indian independence from Great Britain.

Rajan tells us the story of a young Indian man in his late twenties, who has returned home to India after an extended stay abroad. Educated on scholarship at Cambridge, V.S. Krishnan remained in England throughout World War II and finds himself back in a homeland that he no longer identifies with. His relationship with his family is austere, as he views them with a cool Western attitude and they in turn view him as a somewhat perverse product of two environments.

Krishan is home for good however, and in time he begins to submit to the plotting traditions of his parents and homeland. A marriage is arranged on practical lines and he abandons his dream of becoming a teacher in order to take a more respectable job in the civil service. Life in India is about to change however, and violence will beset young Krishnan from within and without.

The first moment of foreshadowed strife emerges while Krishna, his wife Kamala and his new friend Vijayaraghavan attend a "peaceful" protest which of course turns incredibly violent. The normally demure Kamala, who hails from a austere Brahmin family, hangs on every word of the orators and shouted slogans. Her eyes burn with anger and conviction, which Krishnan recognizes as harbingers of potential tragedy. Some of the novel's most polemically eloquent language is uttered by the once supposedly meek housewife.

"It's all in us, in the many, many years of occupation, submission to the State, obedience to the family, every inch of our lives completely calculated, every step, down to the relief of the grave. And if we wanted to protest, there was only the pitiless discipline of nonviolence. Then all of a sudden the garden belongs to us, and we reach up into the blossoming tree to pluck the ashes."

This is impassioned language. Rajan's love for the high poetic comes alive in The Dark Dancer, both in powerful verbiage and dramatic plotting.

Enter Cynthia.

Krishnan's friend from college, who has grown into a tall, poised beauty that evokes instant fear in Krishnan's heart. He recalls her fascination with all things Indian and how prone she was to exoticizing him and India to fit her romantic views. She has grown into an enlightened seductress who has set him up as her primary target. Krishnan in turn, tried to walk between the life lived with his loyal Kamala and the enticing Cynthia. A love triangle amidst the violence of partition... That's a lot for even a guy as smooth as Krishnan to handle.

The revelation ocurrs when both Cynthia and Krishnan realize that they have misjudged Kamala. Her convictions surpass her Brahmin sense of duty and her involvement in the fight for Indian independence grows increasingly more extreme. Her endangerment leads Krishnan to finally make a choice between East or West.

Or perhaps to stand firmly, defiantly between the two crushing forces.

The Dark Dancer is a novel that was extremely exigent for 1958 and yet would have fared better with an audience from 1978. The western taste for Indian fiction had not yet been rendered insatiable by the likes of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or V.S. Naipaul's Indo-Occidentalism. In general, the English reading world of 1958 was not interested in Indian, African or even South American novels. That would come a decade or so later. To paraphrase Rushdie's expression, the empire had not yet begun to write back.

The Dark Dancer is a sober book, and when compared to Rushdie's masterpiece of magical realism it is outright mundane. It lacks any whimsy and its comedic elements are couched in the drama of manners, which is ironically and thoroughly British. It is however a powerful story that deals directly, and perhaps more efficiently, with the questions of identity and belonging that Rushdie has wrestled with in his writings and quite famously in his actual life.

It is written straight, and in this sense is more argumentative than the literary inventiveness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. It is more direct but equally as aware of the implications held within a life lived between realms.

"I'm a half and halfer," she replied a little wryly, "and home could be close to you because your a half and halfer also. Like something in a mirror, the same image but the loyalties reversed."

"It's a no man's land, he told her. "You want to live there, between two worlds, under perpetual gunfire."

Salman Rushdie probably knows a little something about that.