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SIMPLE GIMPL by Isaac Bashevis Singer; trans. by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow & David Stromberg; illus. by Liana Finck
also a streak of anachronism that weakens the book’s sense of history. A formerly enslaved woman–turned–sex worker named Hope explains to Rachel why she does that kind of work: “I make money and that means I don’t have to give myself up completely.” It’s a 21st-century feminist attitude that seems unlikely for a 19th-century woman, as do some of Rachel’s meditations on the destruction of the environment wrought by plantation farming. The novel’s flaws of plot, character, and verisimilitude are frequent enough that it doesn’t achieve the inspirational power it seems to aim for.
A formerly enslaved mother’s search for her lost children is emotionally diluted by lack of craft.
SIMPLE GIMPL The Definitive Bilingual Edition
Singer, Isaac Bashevis Trans. by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow & David Stromberg Illus. by Liana Finck Restless Books (128 pp.) $22.00 | March 14, 2023 978-1-63206-038-9
The definitive edition of a well-known piece of Jewish literary history.
Originally published in Yiddish in 1945, one of Singer’s most canonical stories describes a village simpleton, a guileless, goodhearted, gullible fool, Gimpl, who works in a bakery and appears to believe whatever he is told. He is told all sorts of things: that the moon has fallen down, a cow has flown over the roof, the Messiah has arrived. At first he vows never again to believe what he is told; then, “to believe everything. What do you gain by not believing? Today you don’t believe your wife, tomorrow you won’t believe in God.” The story was famously translated into English by Bellow in a matter of hours, though the faithfulness of that translation was quickly called into question. The present volume, gorgeously illustrated by Finck, presents Bellow’s version alongside a translation begun by Singer himself and completed by the translator and scholar Stromberg; this is followed by the Yiddish original. On its own, the story is magnificent: a little jewel cut with a manic humor. But the real value of this volume is in laying the two translations side by side and comparing the different flavor each one lends to Singer’s prose. In Stromberg and Singer’s translation, Gimpl “had seven nicknames: jerk, jackass, moron, idiot, nincompoop, sucker, simpleton.” In Bellow’s, Gimpl’s nicknames are “imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool.” To Stromberg and Singer, Gimpl’s wife “had a mouth that moved a mile a minute,” while Bellow says her “mouth would open as if it were on a hinge, and she had a fierce tongue.”
Beautifully printed and presented, this new edition is a gift to readers and scholars alike.
COLD PEOPLE
Smith, Tom Rob Scribner (368 pp.) $28.00 | Feb. 7, 2023 9781982198404
After aliens occupy Earth in 2023 and enact “the largest genocide ever committed,” all human survivors are forced to live in Antarctica, where genetic engineering becomes key to their survival as a species.
The survivors are given 30 days to make it to the frigid continent. Children younger than 14 and adults older than 45 must be left behind. In Hope Town, a ramshackle settlement one group of immigrants creates, the arts are “as important to survival as housing and food.” But in McMurdo City, where billionaires and Nobel Prize winners reside, science rules. The fruits of the research there include “ice-adapted” children including Echo, a 6-foot-6 female with blue blood, lizardlike skin, and fat cells derived from the octopus. Increasingly, tension grows between those who have embraced the DNA modifications as a way of protecting their children from the subzero cold and those who believe that only an entirely new breed of human is capable of surviving in it. “Invaded by aliens, we have created aliens of our own,” declares an unhappy geneticist. Part Frankenstein and part Nineteen Eighty-Four, the latest novel by the author of Child 44 (2008) is nothing if not ambitious. But after getting off to a great start, in which a family overcomes grievous odds to make it to Antarctica by supertanker only to get caught in an offshore logjam and risk missing the aliens’ deadline, the novel loses its heart and narrative sweep to stiffly written scenes and didactic commentaries. Smith has no interest in the aliens, who are never seen or heard. There’s little character development—Echo could have been sketched in by a computer. And an ordinary character’s physical attraction to her is awkward to the point of icky.
A dystopian novel that can be as cold as its setting.
MOTHERED
Stage, Zoje Thomas & Mercer (318 pp.) $28.99 | March 1, 2023 978-1-6625-0624-6
A young woman questions her sanity after she’s forced to cohabit with her estranged mother. When Grace, a happily single 30-something who enjoys her job as a hairdresser and the independence she has gained from living alone in Pittsburgh, gets a call from her mother, Jackie, who wants to move in with her during the Covid pandemic, she is not thrilled. She and her mother have not been close since the death of her disabled twin sister, Hope, nearly 20 years earlier. But her mother needs her assistance, and with her income slashed
nights from this galaxy
because of the stay-at-home order, Grace needs help paying her mortgage, so she reluctantly agrees. The two coexist relatively peacefully for a while, the atmosphere sometimes pleasant but more often claustrophobic and oppressive. Just as it seems the two women might reconcile, Grace starts to have trouble sleeping, and soon, nightmares take over her entire unconscious life. When they begin to seep in during the day as well, she starts to question her own mental state as well as her mother’s, and both she and the reader start to wonder if her sanity is connected to her mother’s presence and what is really going on in that house. Amid her intense newfound insomnia, her mother makes a startling accusation, and things take a turn for the worse. The tense relationship between Grace and Jackie is well drawn and relatable. Though the nightmares sometimes get repetitive and take up too much space, the overarching plot and unreliable narrative voice—written in the third person but very close to Grace’s perspective—make this a disturbing yet addictive read.
This compelling book will keep you wondering what is real and what is madness.
NIGHTS FROM THIS GALAXY
Weitzel, Wil Sarabande (200 pp.) $17.95 paper | March 14, 2023 978-1-956046-06-9
Weitzel’s debut collection of 10 spare, haunting stories focuses on the fraught relationships between often guilt-ridden humans and other predators around the globe. Both humans and animals exist in a diminished world of vanishing wilderness. The animals are often not in great shape. “Three Parts of Hunger” traces in excruciating detail a death watch on an elderly lion in the Kalahari Desert, during which two travelers risk their own lives. The human characters in Weitzel’s stories often are not in much better condition than the animals. Sometimes this is because of bad choices they’ve made, and sometimes it’s because they have a kind of bitter shame about the actions of humanity in general that causes them to sacrifice themselves to the animals they see as more worthy than humans—this is what the heroine of “Wilderness” does in a tribute to the wolves of the Adirondacks. While Weitzel usually walks a thin line between horror and wonder directed toward the natural world, some of the stories, particularly those focusing most directly on human beings, are so brutal as to be nearly unreadable. The stunted 12-year-old boy at the center of “Run” is restrained by a leash at all times, forced to sleep outside at the rural northeastern Tennessee home of his stepfather, and subjected to all manner of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Most of the fathers in the stories are not as bad as that one, fortunately, but they are often cold and punitively withholding, like the dying father of the young woman at the center of “The Canoeist,” who basically disowns her because he believes that her longing for adventure in the outdoors is dangerous. Only a few times, as in the thrilling and surprising “Leviathan,” does the author allow humans and animals both to live up to their potential.
Grimly beautiful and not for the faint of heart.
GONE LIKE YESTERDAY
Williams, Janelle M. Tiny Reparations (368 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 14, 2023 9780593471630
A young Black college-prep coach searches for her missing brother alongside one of her students in this mesmerizing magical realist debut. Zahra Robinson has grown accustomed to the moths. They “appear out of thin air…in moments of distress but in moments of calm too,” sometimes one at a time and sometimes in clusters, but they are always singing songs that few besides Zahra can hear. She’s tried to tune them out since moving to New York, but a coincidence (she makes a connection with Trey, a cab driver seeking college prep help for his niece, Sammie) followed by a crisis (her grandmother calls to say that Zahra’s brother, Derrick, who was always preoccupied with the moths, has disappeared) forces her to start listening again. Zahra agrees to help Sammie, a Trinidadian American high school senior who is navigating her identity while attending a fancy prep school, dealing with her crush on a classmate, and trying to handle the frustrations of writing her college essay. When Trey hears that Zahra has to go to Atlanta to look for her brother, he offers to drive her under the guise of taking Sammie to visit Spelman. Soon all three are embroiled in familial revelations and the ghostly mysteries swirling around the house where Zahra and Derrick grew up. Williams has a keen eye for detail and a lyrical voice, and her exploration of personal and collective histories is marked by maturity and compassion. The magic of the novel’s moths is truly imaginative, making it a disappointment that pacing issues prevent the propulsive third act, in which the magic crescendos, from resonating quite as deeply it should.
An uneven but profoundly beautiful novel that takes legacy seriously, from a promising new writer.
THE RED BALCONY
Wilson, Jonathan Schocken (272 pp.) $27.00 | Feb. 21, 2023 978-0-805-24369-7
A young English lawyer confronts moral ambiguity in Palestine under the British Mandate. Set in Palestine in 1933 and based on true events, Wilson’s smart, fast-paced novel focuses on the months following the assassination of Haim Arlosoroff, gunned down on a Tel
