The Loser, and: The Seizure of Power, and: The Frog Who Dared to Croak, and: Midnight in the Century (review)

132 the minnesota review war, but from fever, hunger, winter. One of the main themes of Wilderness Plots is the struggle with the wilderness. The tales move ahead slowly in time: many of the early stories are about Indians and clearing the land; by the end of the collection we are in a world of newspapers and embryonic dties. But the storiles are interlocked in life as wdl as in time: a brief tale of an enterprising woman who raises sheep for thdr wool leads to the story of Colonel Caleb Punderson who, after losing sheep and other domestic animals to "ravenous night beasts," organizes a hunt in 1822 that kiUs dozens of bears, wolves, wildcats, and other wild animals. The history of Mercer County's first dam (destroyed by residents convinced it breeds fever) is followed by the story of Captain Hebediah Dumest, surveyor for the 1840 Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal (destroyed 16 years later when the railroad moved west). The book's title suggests its hybrid form: "wilderness plots* are both pieces of ground and plans for a narrative, and Scott Sanders is working that fertile land between fiction and history: When, in my reading, I turned up a character whose exploits or sufferings touched me, I wrote a narrative about him or her. Often I had no more than a sentence to work from, rarely more than a paragraph, because the people who appealed to me most were the obscure ones, whose names show up only in out-of-the-way chronicles. . . . Certainly this is not some radical new form of fiction, but Sanders is giving artistic shape to a piece of American history, so that we may learn it and remember it. (And teach it: Wilderness Plots would work wonderfully both in a freshman composition course and in a survey of American history.) His characters are "the sort of people who, in all ages, have actually made human history": people with names like Thankful Bissdl, Shadrack Bostwick, Ethelbert Baker, Gallipolis Jennings, and Smither Mahowald, who settle in places Uke Rattlesnake Knob, Breadneck Creek, or Black Bottom Swamp, and buUd villages with names Uke Defiance, Endurance, Enterprise, Recovery, Mount Hope, and Morning Sun.n. Consider just one of these tales, the story of Rebeccah Versailles, who excaped slavery by way of the Underground Railroad to Ashtabula County, Ohio, only to find that white schools would not educate her four children. She could not teach her chUdren what she did not know. So she became a master at carving pens out of turkey quills and stitching foolscap sheets into copybooks. In exchange for her work, the schoolmaster let her squat in one corner of the dassroom while his white students practiced thdr writing, sums, and spelling. Each night she would spoon into her children what she had gleaned during the day. They learned to write using the finest quill pens in Ashtabula County. After seven winters of this, all four of them were sd to become teachers. Before Rebeccah Versailles sent them away to the Quaker institute, she made them promise never to refuse to teach anybody, not any variety of body whatsoever, who honestly wanted to learn. Here is history from the ground up, and fiction of the most human form (as the editors of Carolina and CoEvolution (Quarterly, Georgia and Ohio Review, and other magazines undoubtedly recognized when they first printed these stories). Ifone studies "carefuUy the settlement of any region in America," Sanders concludes in his Foreword to this collection, "one will discover the lineaments of our national character." In these tales of faith and foolishness, vision and violence, sagacity and stupidity, we do just that. DAVID PECK George Konrád. The Loser, trans. Ivan Sanders. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. 315 pp. $7.95 (paper), $14.95 (hardbound). reviews 133 Czeslaw MUosz. The Seizure of Power, trans. Celina Wieniewska. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982. 245 pp. $6.95 (paper), $14.95 (hardbound). Richard Sennett. The Frog Who Dared to Croak. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982. 182 pp. $11.95 (hardbound). Victor Serge. Midnight in the Century, trans. Richard Greeman. London: Writers and Readers, 1982 (distributed in the U.S...