When I was a teenager in South Jersey and getting a driving lesson from my dad, he casually mentioned that I should look in the rearview mirror every now and then to see what was going on behind me. To borrow an expression from my Italian grandmother, I remained with my mouth open—that is, I was astonished. How was it possible, I wondered, to look in front of me and behind me at the same time? In that instant, I probably knew that I would very soon become a passionate nondriver, but I couldn’t have imagined that I would find my calling doing the very thing I thought impossible: looking forward and backward simultaneously.
I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer always varies, as each book is different. But for my latest, Mister Lullaby, the idea was sparked by a luridly creepy picture of the Petite Ceinture, a once-thriving and now abandoned railway looping around the center of Paris, built more than 150 years ago. Moss and algae now festoon the stone entrances and exits, with doors that lead down to the hidden world of the Paris catacombs below. Inside the Petite Ceinture, the silence is palpable; the darkness, seemingly eternal; the echoes, endless; the phosphorus mushrooms glowing in the darkest recesses, unworldly.
As long as there’s something to quit, I have the potential to feed this addiction of mine, which will inevitably lead to the ultimate quitting: death. See you in health.
“Chevengur,” the first and greatest novel by the Russian writer Andrey Platonov, tells two stories: an ironic parable of nascent Soviet Russia and the woeful history of the book’s publication. When Platonov finished it in his late 20s, not long after the death of Lenin, early readers cautioned the young novelist against the folly of emphasizing verity over glory: “I want to warn you now,” his editor said after reading a draft in 1927, “to correct it and erase the impression that it creates.” Maxim Gorky was more direct: “Whatever you may have wished, you have portrayed reality in a lyrico-satirical light that is, of course, unacceptable to our censorship.” Joseph Stalin simply scribbled “Bastard” over Platonov’s work.
Reading the book, these sentiments seem reasonable. Many colorful words could describe “Chevengur” — hilarious, harrowing, poetic, mythic — but flattering, at least of state-run communism, isn’t one of them. While Platonov thought he had written an “honest attempt to portray the beginning of communist society,” his British publisher has pitched it as “The Soviet Don Quixote,” a phrase that’s on the money. The eponymous town where half of the book is set, and the La Mancha-esque region that surrounds it, are rife with quixotic characters caught in the spirit of a revolution that is swallowing them alive. Interpreting the novel as ridicule, Stalin halted the publication of “Chevengur.” Though Platonov wrote (and was occasionally published) until his death in 1951, his novels remained censored until Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in the Glasnost era.
A poet and journalist who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, Howsare looks behind those numbers, at the deeper questions of human-animal coexistence. Her thoroughly researched and comprehensive book combines science, philosophy and history, delving into the role of deer not only as prey and pest but also as neighbor and artistic inspiration, from N’laka’pamux mythology to the Deer Lady on “Reservation Dogs.” Deer, she writes, are “a single node where many of my questions — about damage, repair, myth, nourishment, and the things that divide us — might come together.”