 Reviews of three new books about irresponsible media, obsessive Russian loners, and a nomadic adolescent girl.
A GIRL'S OWN STORY Irini Spanidou's first novel, God's Snake (just released in paperback), told the tale of a young girl's relatively nomadic life in 1950s Greece. It succeeded in moving beyond the simply autobiographical to reveal the emotions behind the occasional terrors and momentary triumphs of growing up. In her new work, Fear, Spanidou continues her story of Anna, who is now 13 years old and still living in the shadow of her oppressive father, a gruff army officer who wishes that his first-born had been a boy. The first-person narrative remains episodic but this time favors certain periods of time (often involving the mistreatment of people) over isolated events (often involving the mistreatment of animals). Inside the home, tensions have not dissipated: Anna's beautiful mother is still embittered by the claustrophobic effects of marriage and motherhood, and her overbearing father is just as self-centered as ever. Added to these problems--and the insecurity brought about by constantly moving from one military base to another--is Anna's attraction to her newfound friend, Vera. While Anna loves her seemingly wiser companion and longs to please her, she knows that their relationship will be inevitably severed by another move. As if these travails were not enough to render a young girl's life catastrophic, yet another threat is lurking in the periphery--that of the serial killer known as the Dragon, for whom Anna has nurtured a perfectly logical sympathy. In general, Spanidou's storytelling is admirable and certainly worthy of the praise it has earned from the likes of Grace Paley and Doris Lessing. At times, though, it is a little heavy-handed and tends to suffer from authorial wish-fulfillment in the form of retroactive brilliance on the part of its young protagonist. Jonathan Morrow
LONERS AND LUNACY Victor Pelevin's latest short-story collection can be read as both a tribute to Dostoevski and a departure from him; the characters who populate Pelevin's "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" resemble the great Russian novelist's characters in that they're loners who don't know that they're loners. In the story "The Tarzan Swing," which is reminiscent of Dostoevski's "The Double," it comes as a shock to the protagonist that he may be carrying on a conversation with his own shadow. But unlike "The Double," in this story the reader is never sure if the "companion" is real or not. This kind of lunacy afflicts many of the characters in Pelevin's stories; they wander through their days in dreams, obsessing on the meaning of life in a post-perestroika world. Where Dostoevski's characters are bogged down by paranoid delusions, Pelevin's strangely narcissistic characters find themselves faced with the empty but ultimately self-satisfying prospect of solipsism, and they take it in stride that the world is in a kind of surreal flux. Characters exist outside themselves, and the physical world is compromised by spatial and temporal impossibilities--a universe exists in a teapot, dream landscapes are superimposed on real ones and Russia is a sewer cover away from China. In the title story, a wanderer lives for a time in the body of a wolf, and in stunning detail we feel how he moves and smells and sees. This story's placement at the beginning of the collection makes it the perfect entree into the fantastical world that Pelevin creates. And though not all of his stories are as clever and whimsical as this one, make no mistake: This is great literature. Francesca French
MANUFACTURING APATHY For a while at the end of the Cold War, there was much talk of a new, peaceful and progressive era, a worldwide Prague Spring with no Soviet Union left to ruin things. It didn't take long for that vision to be demolished under a barrage of news reporting from Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere that showed that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are still galloping around the globe. In the face of this dizzying death and destruction, the public briefly tunes into grim reality before retreating numbly, in a response known as "compassion fatigue." Is compassion fatigue simply a natural human response to overwhelming suffering? Not according to Susan D. Moeller, director of the journalism program and assistant professor of American studies at Brandeis University (and also a journalist). In her book on the subject, she makes a compelling argument that compassion fatigue is a direct consequence of the way that news is presented. In some respects a cousin to Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, Moeller's book looks at how the news business contributes to public misunderstanding of the world around us. Chomsky showed how news coverage leads the public to a politically skewed understanding of events. Moeller demonstrates, in a penetrating behind-the-news analysis of how several major stories have been packaged, how it leads to no understanding at all. News organizations drop recent stories to run breathlessly after new ones; they simplify, often by shoehorning foreign news into American metaphors; and they present desensitizing commercial images alongside photos of human suffering and then sensationalize events to accommodate desensitized readers. Compassion Fatigue is a rebuke and an exhortation to journalists to, as she puts it in her conclusion, "get back to reporting all the news, all the time." James McQuilllen - - - - - - - - - - - -
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