Literature of the Global Age: A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives by Maurizio Ascari (review)

The title of this book is likely to trigger the assumption that this is yet one more study devoted to proving a point already well established by countless critical works at least since the 1990s, namely, that contemporary literature constantly crosses borders, is not informed by the vectors of only one nation state or, sometimes, even one language, and its protagonist are not inscribed, either individually or collectively, by only one culture. Fortunately, both the title and the author’s inference in the book’s introduction that he will follow Franco Moretti’s technique of “distant reading,” which eschews detailed examinations of individual texts in favor of discerning broad transnational trends among a large quantity of narrative prose works, are deceiving. For after this introduction, which does indeed widely investigate critical and poetic tendencies since the dawn of the so-called “global age” after the collapse of Soviet communism, Maurizio Ascari devotes his book’s subsequent chapters to detailed, but also somewhat lyrical/personal engagements with the following relatively contemporary novels: Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Magda Szabó’s The Door (1987), Abraham B. Yeshoshua’s Mr. Mani (1990), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002), and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003).

In claiming that Ascari does not adopt Moretti’s “distant reading” technique, it should not be inferred that Literature of the Global Age precisely follows the practice of New Critical “close reading” either. While admirably attentive to the subtle, complex narrative structures informing all the novels to which he devotes individual chapters, the author does not adopt New Critical insularity; each work is examined in its sociopolitical context (as well as the related context of its contemporary reception), its place within each novelist’s wider oeuvre as well as that of other thematically related works, and with an emphasis on its ethical purport. Absent as well is close reading’s philological rigor; Ascari eschews language nuance in favor of highlighting narratological and performative details, and relies on English-language translations of the works by Szabó, Yehoshua, Sebald, and Murakami (originally written in Hungarian, Hebrew, German, and Japanese, respectively). At first glance, little seems to connect the novels that are the focus of Literature of the Global Age outside their relatively recent vintage. Indeed, at least in Ascari’s reading, there is almost nothing transcultural about the novels he examines by McEwan and Szabó; narrative national and cultural spaces are confined rather exclusively to England in Atonement and Hungary in The Door.

Nevertheless, Ascari’s conclusion ties the book’s disparate chapters, focused on individual novels that seem to have little in common other than complex narrative structures, and, with the above-noted exceptions, hybrid, transnational identities on the part of chief protagonists as well as border-crossing geographic tableaux, into a certain cohesion, a cohesion not effectively established by the introduction. For Ascari notes in this conclusion that he is above all engaged by “the interplay between the aesthetic and the ethical value of a work of literature” (156), and the most significant achievement of Literature of the Global Age is its ability to do just that in all the novels it discusses. Part of the complexity of these novels is that they tend to be informed by multiperspectival narrative voices, and Ascari is adept at showing how this difficult technique is linked to the ethical dimension of each work, for such structures highlight discrete, often clashing points of view and thus foreground the dimension of alterity Ascari sees as fundamental to ethics in the contemporary works he analyzes.

Ascari’s investigation of the novels that are the primary focus of each chapter is broadly consistent, and his treatment of Austerlitz provides a good example. He begins with a summary of his own initial emotional response [End Page...