Recuperating Understanding

Frelik continuedfrom previous page -----------------than school atlases would like us to believe— from Berlin to Stalingrad. The simultaneous conflation of and the transaction between the private and the historical is best exemplified in the opening of one of the Roman Karmen chapters: Europe is Europa; Europe is a woman. Europa's names are Marie-Luise Moskav and Berlin Liubova; Europa is Elena Ekaterinburg and Constanze Konstantinovskaya, not to mention Galina Germany, Rosa Russkaya; Europa encompasses all territory from Anna to Zoya, not omitting the critical railroad junctions Nadezhda, Nina, Fanya, Fridl, Coca (whose formal name was Elena), Katyusha, Verena, Viktoria, Käthe, Katerina, Berthe, Brynhilda, Hilde and Heidi; above all Europa is Elena. The passage is, however, much more thanjust the personalization—or better, feminization—of the territory, which even in such a graceful form is, after all, an old device. It is here that Vollmann captures and conveys something far more profound and bitter about the twentieth-century history of the continent— something apprehensible only to someone who spent time here and listened very carefully to the tectonic tremors of a region that has for centuries suffered from all manner of social and political turmoil. Europe—Central and otherwise—may be a schizophrenic woman, but this unstable identity of the prior century seems to have shifted primarily between the two poles, two minds—Russian and German. In a disquieting twist, the names above are only those of these two nationalities. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Romania may be mentioned, but only in passing; in the grand scheme of things, they become insubstantial territories traversed by losers. (Even more disquieting is the fact that the only character who does not emanate anomie and failure is that of the Comrade.) Naturally, such conclusions are hardly revelatory in handbooks ofpolitical science or history, but there is a marked difference between the intellectual knowledge of power relations and the understanding that resides in the genuine immersion in a zone of almost surreal complexity, an understanding that populates larger-than-life stories with an assortment of mundane characters—artists, military commanders, and people of the streets. Thanks to Gravity 's Rainbow (1973), many of us understand better the terms by which the twentieth century has been heralded as the American century. Europe Central reinforces this designation by demonstrating why the last century was not European, and why Shostakovich claimed that the majority of his symphonies were tombstones. Pawel Frelik is an assistant professor at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland, where he teachesAmerican literature, sciencefiction, and subversive narratives. He is currently preparing a book on William T. Vollmann's writing. Recuperating Understanding Joseph Donahue The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience Ann Lauterbach Viking http://www.penguin.com 272 pages; cloth, $29.95 Hum Ann Lauterbach Penguin http://www.penguin.com 124 pages; paper, $18.00 Sometime after the publication of her second book, Before Recollection, published in 1987, the poetry ofAnn Lauterbach exploded. Fragmentation spiked the studied cadence. Incoherence hovered. It was one of the more notable stylistic evolutions of the time. From then till now, caution has increasingly given way to risk. It is a poetry that thrives on peril. On the evidence of the work, the poet herself seemed unfazed, but changed. She seemed to have shifted not just in how she used words, but in her disposition towards the world. In an interview with Tim Peterson, the poet has attributed this transformation to the death of her sister, Jennifer, memorialized in her third book, Clamor (1991). For all the grief of that loss, death seems to have entered the poems less as lament or absence than as energy. One almost feels, at times, in reading Lauterbach, in following the giddy swirls of sense and the vertigo of its dissolution, that for her, total comprehension would be yet more death. Her new collection of prose, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics ofExperience, illumines the context of, ifnot the crisis behind, the new style. In these pieces, written from 1989 to 2004, Lauterbach steps forth as critic, memoirist, essayist, fabulist, raconteur, public intellectual, even budding aphorist ('"Depression. . .is the better part ofsqualor'"). That this is so is both enlightening and...