BRIEFLY NOTED SPECTACLE, by Pamela Newkirk (Amistad). In 1906, Ota Benga,
a Congolese man, was put on display at the Bronx Zoo as a “pygmy,” often caged and left in the company of an orangutan. Benga had been brought to New York by a missionary and adventurer who claimed (falsely) to have saved him from cannibals; for three weeks, visitors gawked at, and often taunted, the star attraction. Ten years later, having led a lonely and desultory life in America, Benga committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Newkirk’s account of this shocking and shameful story is forceful, though Benga’s voice is unfortunately absent. He never wrote about his experience and gave no interviews, so he remains, inevitably, a mysterious figure. ENCOUNTERS, by George Braziller (Braziller). The heyday of small publishers may have run its course, or given way to the Web, but it is worth recalling the time of Barney Rosset, at Grove; James Laughlin, at New Directions; and Braziller, who has published this charming memoir just short of his hundredth birthday. Braziller served in the war and then published writers as disparate as Janet Frame, Henri Alleg, Nathalie Sarraute, and Orhan Pahmuk. The book is made up of brief chapters––glimpses into a life of integrity and taste, of war, commerce, and literature. There’s also a nifty scene with Marilyn Monroe. Braziller retired when he was ninety-four, handing the reins to his sons. It’s clear that he did so with some regret: his work and the people he met were sources of abiding pleasure. A CURE FOR SUICIDE, by Jesse Ball (Pantheon). Ball’s disorienting novel takes its time revealing the scope of its philosophical concerns, but it rewards patience. Much of the action occurs in exchanges between a man identified as “the claimant,” who appears to have lost his memory, and a woman identified as “the examiner,” who is helping him relearn the fundamentals of human behavior. Halting, stripped-down dialogue, evoking the blank spaces in the claimant’s mind, forces the reader to scramble for purchase. Patterns emerge— the claimant has disturbing dreams and keeps meeting a woman with whom he seems to have had a relationship. When the novel unveils some of its secrets, the result is unexpectedly moving.
Rebecca Makkai (Viking). Ricocheting from the war-torn twentieth century to the reality-showrich present day, the stories in this impressive collection feature characters buffeted by fate—or is it mere happenstance? The death of a circus elephant shapes generations of a small town; a passing remark ruins a plotted-out life. Our sense of history is probed, too, not without humor—Bach appears in a Manhattan living room one day, a spot of comfort in one woman’s post-9/11 life. In a series of shorter pieces, the author relates nuggets of family history and legend, including a story about young women in Budapest who used greasepaint to transform themselves into old women, in order to be spared at least one of war’s ugly realities.
MUSIC FOR WARTIME, by
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 10 & 17, 2015
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