Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Review
Author(s): Frederick Luis Aldama
Review by: Frederick Luis Aldama
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 2, English-Language Writing from Malaysia,
Singapore, and the Philippines (Spring, 2000), pp. 457-458
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40155801
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heres more to textual analysis and the re-
lationship of the text to the situation of
Israeli fiction and its development from
the 1960s onward. Mazor takes the mat-
ter further.
Mazor relates to Oz the teacher, as he
must. This function is evident in all the
author's writing. Oz is viewed in the tra-
dition of modern Hebrew literature as a
guide, a commentator on current events,
and a sort of priest of enlightened Isra-
elism. He is a writer who combines a de-
votion to the recognition of all that is im-
mediate in Israeli society with a
perspective derived from a profound
perception of the unconscious drives
within the individual psyche, as well as
the forces of nature beyond. These two
thrusts often clash, and that is what cre-
ates the dazzling narrative. Thus, there is
a tension between what seems to be the
rational motivation of the character de-
scribed and the behavior manifest. This
is a modern and very Israeli version of
"Man proposes and God disposes."
Lituf ba-afelah is a large work, and, on
the practical level, it would have benefited
from a systematic bibliography of Oz's
works. As it stands, each of the treated
works earns a separate chapter and a very
helpful analysis. Tools deployed in current
literary criticism, such as reader-response
theory, notions of feminism, and analysis
of rhetoric, are judiciously aligned, all with
the single aim of providing an under-
standing of one of the outstanding bodies
of fiction in contemporary Hebrew litera-
ture. From the early work of the 1960s, the
short stories, the early symbolist novels,
the comments on Israeli society, through
his most recent playful poetic fictions such
as Oto hayam (obviously too recent to
come in for consideration here), there is a
unity of approach, a thrust combining
imagination and scope of a high order
with close observation and original analy-
sis. Mazor serves as a brilliant mentor for
the reader in this surging sea.
Leon I. Yudkin
University College London
Native American
Geary Hobson. The Last of the
Ofos. Tucson. University of Arizona
Press. 2000. x + 114 pages. $29.95
($12.95 paper), isbn 0-8165-1958-7
(1959-5 paper).
first novel by poet, essayist, and
scholar Geary Hobson has a very sad
subject - the extinction of a people and
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a language, which come to amount to the
same thing - but manages by virtue of
the art with which it is told not to be en-
tirely sad. Thomas Darko, member of a
tribe - the Mosopelea or Ofo, who even
at the chronological beginning of the
novel number in the single digits - nar-
rates the story almost baldly, and very
colloquially, into a tape recorder, begin-
ning as near as he can get ab ovo with
memories of his relationship to the earth
that he regards as his mother. In range
and in lack of tight connection between
episodes, his story is picaresque, rather
like an Indian version of Little Big Man.
Darko is successively a lumberman;
hunter; oil-field roustabout; moonshiner
and bootlegger who supplies Capone's
organization and encounters Bonnie and
Clyde; convict; Marine wounded at
Tarawa after being rejected as a Code
Talker ("Who would I talk to?"); movie
extra who meets Jim Thorpe; consultant
to the Smithsonian Institution, where at
least one scientist professes to know
more about the Ofos than he does; ob-
server with a young Pueblo poet (proba-
bly Simon Ortiz) of a completely fraudu-
lent Indian conference; and throughout
most of the story, as one character says,
"the lonesomest man I've ever known."
He loses all his family, his faithless wife,
and everything he values, after each set-
back returning to the woods and swamps
where he was raised. Although Darko is
sometimes painfully aware of the op-
pression of his people, his matter-of-fact
tone keeps him from seeming merely a
victim, and throughout his adventures he
maintains a pride and reserve that makes
him thoroughly appealing.
At the end of the novel, rejecting the
scientific exploitation of his knowledge
and the attempt to preserve his language
in Washington, D.C. - no one will ever
speak or listen to him in it again - he
goes home bearing a cane flute and his
dignity. Alone in the swamp, desolate,
he begins to talk in Mosopelea despite
"the great-big lump in my throat, and
soon my low-talking become kind of
loud, and then I wudn't so much singing
as yelling. ... I sung on, and the lump
got smaller and smaller and then it was
gone." He thinks he can hear himself in
the trees and water, "and I knowed pret-
ty good that things was alright for the
time being. But, if they wudn't, then I
figgered I could come back out here to-
morrow night and sing again."
A less disciplined writer would have
spun out the story, and the emotions it
contains, to several times the length of
The Last of the Ofos, but Hobson has real-
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000 • 457
ized his material fully in this short novel
without compacting or scanting it.
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma
Leslie Marmon Silko. Gardens in
the Dunes. New York. Simon &
Schuster. 1999. 479 pages. $25. isbn
0-684-81154-5.
essayist, and novelist Leslie Mar-
mon Silko continues to stretch wide
the canvas of American Indian experi-
ence in her new novel Gardens in the
Dunes. Silko sets the action on the late-
nineteenth-century frontier, as the U.S.
expands; we see two Sand Lizard Indian
orphans displaced from their homeland
and separated from each other after a
cavalry raid on their homestead. The
story follows the two sisters' indepen-
dent quests to rediscover Home.
As Indigo and Sister Salt set out on
their different paths, they encounter a
panoply of colorful, uprooted characters
who seek a similar sense of belonging. In-
digo stumbles into the lives of a proto-
feminist, Hattie, and her experimental
botanist husband Edward (in a handy
metaphor, he is cross-fertilizing orange
with lemon to create a new, more robust
hybrid fruit). Tucked under Hattie's
wing, Indigo travels to England, Corsica,
and Italy as well as the U.S. Southwest.
Although Anglo and moneyed, Hattie
does not quite fit in. At an earlier period %
in her life, for example, her feminist take 22
O
on the gospels ruffled male-primed feath- c
ers, leading to a diagnosis of hysteria re-
|
sulting from "the overstimulation of lec-
tures." Hattie's exclusion from a
male-governed intellectual world and In-
>
digo's racial estrangement ("now a Sand
Lizard girl was loose in the white peo- m
i/>
ple's world") make for a perfect, unspo-
ken understanding between the two. Not
surprisingly, Indigo takes to Hattie's
proto-environmentalist Aunt Bronwyn,
who wants to save forests from the "wide
scars in the bellies of the hills" inflicted
by capitalist developers. Bronwyn affirms
Indigo's identity as an American and an
Indian: "After all, she was an American
- 'Whatever an American is'."
Woven among Indigo's feminist role-
modeling are chapters that follow the
older sibling, Sister Salt. Unlike Indigo,
Sister Salt remains in the Southwest,
eking out a living by washing laundry
and servicing frontiersmen in Arizona.
Although she does not traverse the great
oceans, she too bonds with a spectrum of
characters, including Candy, a mixed
African- American/ Indian ex-slave who
plans to brew beer only until he can
move to a more race-friendly place.
Not surprisingly, in this story Silko
shifts out of the mythopoetic-heavy nar-
rative voice heard in her earlier novels,
trying her hand at classic nineteenth-cen-
tury dramatic realism a la Henry James.
Although such verisimilitude dampens
the novel's pace, deflating those heavy
sighs and grand emotions we might feel
as we follow Indigo and Sister Salt in
their struggle to survive, Silko succeeds
on the whole. Not only does the tech-
nique provide the appropriate narrative
container to give the feel for a time past,
but it also speaks to Silko's agility with
words and forms that mainstream read-
ers might not associate with an Indian
writer. She proves once again that Indian
writers can give voice to their reality in a
number of styles, not just the mythopoet-
ic. Of course, Gardens isn't by-the-book
classic realism. Silko infuses the story
with many dream sequences and turns
out consummately beautiful sentences:
"Later a big moon, not quite full, flooded
the dunes with silver blue light that
made the big daturea blossoms flow as
they perfumed the evening air."
Gardens in the Dunes does present re-
freshing new views of people who, at the
social and racial margins, work from
common ground to resist the racist, ma-
terialist elite that tries to displace and
pathologize difference. Home for Silko is
not about racial solidarity. It is about
seeking out like-minded peoples who are
open to new visions and to change, and
who share a deep commitment to the
earth and the human spirit.
Frederick Luis Aldama
Stanford University
Portuguese
Georges Bourdoukan. O Peregri-
no. Sao Paulo. Casa Amarela. 1999.
150 pages, isbn 8-586821-02-0.
TV ^"ucn like those sixteenth-century
-LVJLchronicles bordering on the fantas-
tic and so common to Portuguese letters,
O Peregrino (The Pilgrim) begins with a
detailed subtitle, here superimposed on
the cover: a transcendental visual image
of Man symbolically walking alone
through shifting sand dunes. However,
what follows is more akin to cinematic
coming attractions than to the essentially
philosophical, theological, mystical, even
cabalistic currents which permeate
458 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • 74:2 • SPRING 2000
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Georges Bourdoukan's enticing, multi-
faceted parable. In fact, Bourdoukan's is
a timeless, universal search for happiness
and truth, seemingly spanning centuries,
indeed millennia. Yet it is also precari-
ously anchored to a present day whose
social problems, from Shiite human
bombs to "harvesting" youthful body or-
gans in Third World countries, persist.
It is through the title protagonist -
whose varied designations, by the way,
in no way detract from his charisma and
refreshing idealism - that the author
finds his thematic vehicle of choice. Fur-
ther helping to parody Christ's life is the
presence of such glaring symbols incar-
nate as Joseph, Mary, Lazarus, Mary
Magdalene, Gabriel, even a Francis of
Assisi.
In the polemic encounters which en-
sue, in the numerous dreams particularly
vented throughout O Peregrino, and in fa-
miliar Christian allusions from the Bible,
persistent motifs abound. Of special note
is class struggle, routinely in the fore-
front where it is sure to combat the twist-
ed if conventional notion that the poor
are an unavoidable fixture of social inter-
course and, as such, immutable.
The vision of flying carpets amid stark
realism, of combining unique historical
tidbits with religious cliche, manages to
turn O Peregrino into an eloquent appeal
for reason. In fact, along with its title, so
suggestive of acquired knowledge, the
volume proves itself, above all, to be
both a spiritual treasure hunt and a wish
list for a better tomorrow.
Malcolm Silverman
San Diego State University
Luiz Ruffato. (Os sobreviventes).
Sao Paulo. Boitempo. 2000. 183
pages, isbn 85-85934-39-5.
to the most unobservant reader,
Luiz Ruffato's six new tales are more
than timeless, borderless, or, for that
matter, eerily familiar in a Chekhovian
way. Indeed, their pervasive mood of in-
trospection and futility are, first and fore-
most, disquieting paeans to the stark un-
derbelly of human nature. To be sure,
such an onerous thesis is hinted at
throughout - by infrequent epigraphs
(borrowed from such disparate reposito-
ries of doom and gloom as Jorge de Lima
and the Old Testament), by Ruffato's use
of uncomplicated small-town Minas as
metaphor for all humankind, and by a
troubled cast of characters as well.
In fact, the very book title alludes to
figures large and small, all branded
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generically as survivors and enveloped,
quite literally, between enigmatic paren-
theses. It is a recourse designed to rein-
force visually the alienation so much a
part of modern existence as well as char-
acter modus operandi. To begin with,
Ruffato's individual stories bear sugges-
tive titles. Some, like "Carta a uma jovem
senhora" and "Urn outro mundo," clear-
ly infer distance (from loved ones, in
time and space); others suggest certain
festering problems as yet unresolved, as
in the deceptively naive titles of "A
solugao," "O segredo," "A expiagao,"
and, lastly, "Aquario," with its implicit
displeasure over limited privacy.
Certainly the macrocosmic Cataguases,
aside from colorless backdrop and spa-
tial unifier, is unpretentious enough; and
even its indigenous etymological roots -
an ill-defined amalgam of dense forests
and valleys - prove inconspicuous. As
such, Cataguases is also propitious for
the extensive mental machinations which
characterize the Ruffato prototype, im-
mersed, as usual, in his or her private
(melo)drama and sure to inspire, if not
reader involvement and compassion, at
least attention.
Ruffato's is a selective, subjective at-
mosphere of solitude and inner pain, en-
dowed more with mystery than with sus-
pense, more with death than with dying.
Preferred motifs, for instance, like the
nuances of love lost and the (doomed)
return home (after a long absence), arise
from a necessarily blurred vision of peo-
ple and events. Dissatisfaction continues
to abound, while oppression manifests
itself conspicuously in obtrusive vocabu-
lary, variations in type size, and uncon-
ventional punctuation, even passing con-
cretist-like allusions.
The author, ever attentive to the psy-
chological depth which characterizes his
style, initiates his narration with "A so-
luqao." There, female factory workers
deal with poverty and peer pressure, dat-
ing and daydreaming. They are, howev-
er, embellished with fleeting intertextual-
ity and, especially, disquieting flashback.
They are also Brazilian Cinderellas
whose familiar cliches dichotomize into
conventional roles within the immemori-
al suggestions common to one of the old-
est of motifs. Love, though, or what ex-
pediently passes for it, proves elusive.
In "O segredo" Ruffato shines in his
cathartic recounting, from childhood on-
ward, of the local schoolteacher, a co-
opted lyric poet, newspaper contributor,
seminary dropout, and prototypical
small-town bumpkin. In "Carta a uma
jovem senhora" the protagonist is