Amerika

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 69 Homecoming Denys Johnson-Davies, ed. and tr. American University in Cairo Press Since the inception of Egyptian short fiction just sixty years ago, Egyptian writers and translators have struggled to find a place for Egyptian literature on the global stage. This collection of fifty-six remarkable stories written across those six decades is a testament to their success. Erri De Luca The Day Before Happiness Michael F. Moore, tr. Other Press A nameless orphan in Naples sees the fleeting image of a girl in a window, and it haunts him until the day that they meet. Told with simple but compelling prose, The Day Before Happiness is an homage to youth, remembrance, and the search for contentment. Nota Bene the characters because of the color of their skin. However, this story is deeper than a tale of racial violence. It ends with the silvery god coming down to explain to the yellow priest that he did not want to create the world with such hatred and aggression . He is no sadist, but it is the only reality that he knows—he and his wife were themselves beaten by golden gods. Life in this collection is allowed to be open-ended, as it truly is. Little is resolved, and much is permeated with uncertainty. “Creative Writing,” a story about a man who begins going to writing classes after his wife finds great success in them, ends with the man putting down his pen, and saying apologetically, “I don’t have an ending.” Keret, too, has no ending, but he also has no need to apologize. The only clear ending that life gives us is death, and Keret is more concerned with capturing life, though life filled with the sorrow of the presence of death. The stories in this collection are analogous to the headstand pose in yoga practice: uncomfortable, unsustainable , even painful at times, but unrivaled in their power to help us see the world with new eyes. Kerri Shadid Edmond, Oklahoma Sergio Kokis. Amerika. Montréal. Lévesque . 2012. isbn 9782923844824 With a title that automatically evokes Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Amerika provides a jarringly absurd version of the traditional immigrant narrative. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Waldemar Salis, the Lutheran pastor of an impoverished rural community in the Baltic region of Latvia, which was then a part of the vast Russian empire, seeks a way to improve the dismal economic lot of his flock— while heightening his own status (or rather his perception of himself) as a presumably visionary spiritual leader. Against the backdrop of the repression that followed the first (failed) Russian revolution of 1905, echoes of which belatedly reach Waldemar’s isolated small town, the pastor eagerly embraces an unprecedented offer of free passage, for himself and his churchgoers, to the promised land of modern times. Lured by enticing assurances of the availability of cheap and fertile farmland that will purportedly yield plentiful harvests and future prosperity, several families decide to accompany Waldemar on the long ocean voyage. Even before the villagers start to make plans to abandon their homes, however, there are troubling signs as to the real nature of their proposed exodus and resettlement. The most important of these early turns of events is that the beguiling offer of free passage, without which the villagers could never hope to escape from their lives of grinding poverty, is not to the fabled l’Amérique, but to a country much farther south, of which they are only dimly aware, le Brésil. At first taken aback, Waldemar, who is as passionate about religion as he is about sex with both his young wife and his bewitching mother-in-law, endeavors to overcome the misgivings of the villagers, for whom the little-known Brazil does not hold the same promises of freedom and affluence as the famous America. Waldemar will ultimately be successful in the first part of his self-appointed task, to emulate Moses by guiding 70 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews some of his reluctant followers across the water to a new homeland. Tragically , the lengthy and harrowing journey across the Atlantic will lead only to calamitous...

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