Operatic Masquerade

Page 28 American Book Review unclear. But first, as a rule, the language in which it was written must disappear. Everything becomes confusing. ” Unfortunately, this sentiment is apt—in Dust, the reader is at times unsure if the translator doesn’t understand the material or if, as a trope, the original is meant to confuse and distort. To the translators ’ credit, there is a consistent voice throughout, aided by the author’s use of repetition, and the ways in which the chapters overlap, reference, and wink at one another. Dust introduces the reader to a large circle of intellectuals, and we become familiar with the author’s own literary heroes and villains (Gertrude Stein, for instance, will never be forgiven for declaring Paul Bowles “not a real poet,” no matter how Bowles might have felt about the distinction). There is no forgetting Dragomoshchenko’s nationality, and for the Russophile, some of the most beautiful moments in the book are found in descriptions of St. Petersburg. One can visit the hung-over morning scene in the 1960s Café Saigon on Nevsky Prospect, smell the sharp scent of burning garbage, experience the phenomenon of the city’s white nights, even as they wane: “In July the heat of blasting music fades, candlelight gets dim, exotic trophies get covered with a patina of chance, and the mirage of yet another golden season rises up behind your back.” Dragomoshchenko describes what he believes to be the impossible notion of capturing a place in a snapshot or a postcard, yet his Petersburg vignettes seem to do just that. If unorthodox in its narrative and construction, the text is united in a playful, self-referential manner. Dragomoshchenko’s poetic voice triumphs, and the overall effect is enduringly human: “To tell you the truth, what I liked best was watching you look at the pecked rowanberries through the window, watching you stomp on your dress with both your feet, hearing you get in the shower and shout that we’d never be together again.” Kara Mason is an editor at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. A former editor of literature in translation at Archipelago Books in Brooklyn, she is a great fan of international literature. Mason continued from previous page Operatic Masquerade Samuele F. S. Pardini Voices in a Mask Geoffrey Green TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu 244 pages; paper, $16.95 “Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention , please?”With this line Geoffrey Green opens his first work of fiction, Voices in a Mask, and the reader immediately knows what his collection of exquisite seven short stories based on opera’s librettos, built on the real life of their singers and composers, and embellished with the author’s deep knowledge of opera, literature, and literary theory are all about. They are fictional literary stages wherein the narrator unleashes his and a multitude of characters’ voices to play with some very ancient questions about the arts, especially literature. Some of these questions are the following: What is art? What is its function? For whom do writers write? What is the relationship between art and life, fiction and facts, reality and representation? Do meanings have a meaning? Is there truth in art? In life? What is the power of art? In short, to paraphrase Raymond Carver, Green asks, what do we talk about when we talk about art? Ultimately, Voices in a Mask is a rebuke of the interpretation of that kind of literature that we used to call postmodern. It is, of course, a question as old as art itself, one that artists, philosophers, critics, and readers have debated in the past, debate in the present, and, one would guess and hope, will continue to debate as long as people will continue to write fiction. That is to say, Green has taken up a very difficult, if not the most difficult topic for a writer to deal with, especially for a writer’s first attempt at fiction. However, while he is clearly conscious of the slippery ground he is walking on, he is equally at home on it. Indeed, he is fully in command of the topic and confident...