DISCOVERIES

It is not always appropriate to question an author’s motivations, especially in fiction. We should fall headlong into the story, as though the writer had no public face. But this is Christa Wolf, German writer and for two decades the self-appointed conscience of her country. (It was her 1990 novella, “What Remains?,” based on her experience with the Stasi, that finally threw authorities into a frenzy of blackballing.)

Exiled and misunderstood in her home country, Wolf bears no small resemblance to Medea, reviled in Corinth, her country by marriage to Jason; accused of murdering her brother, her children and her husband’s new lover; branded a harlot, adulterer and witch.

In Wolf’s retelling, Medea is a dark-haired, dark-skinned keeper of secrets: a healer, independent, the voice of integrity and natural passion. When she leaves her people, the Colchians, for the Corinthians, she leaves a healthy native culture for a decrepit, paranoid one. Her story is told, true to Greek tragedy, in several voices: her own, Jason’s, Agameda’s (a pupil of Medea), Akamas’ (King Creon’s astronomer), Leukon’s (deputy astronomer) and Glauce’s (daughter of King Creon and Jason’s bride-to-be).

These voices strike one as awkward, until the awkwardness is swept away by the drama, making it preferable to read this all in one sitting. As for Medea, she is a little too perfect. Myths are retold to make them live, not to inscribe them deeper in the constellation.

A CROWDED HEART. By Nicholas Papandreou (Picador: 192 pp., $21)

Greece is irresistible. And when it dons the mantle of fiction, as in the case of “The Crowded Heart,” a fictionalized memoir, Greece sets up such a clattering and longing, such a thumping in the heart that it is hard for the story to fall flat. Papandreou, young son of the big man, son of Greece, knows this better than any of us. His very first paragraph attests to the seduction: “To describe Greece I would share with you a tomato on the sandy beaches of Skopellos, open a sea-urchin with my penknife and serve you the scarlet eggs inside while the salt stretches the skin on our backs. We would bodysurf on white waves in the day and soak up the moonlight at night.”

This is the story of Papandreou’s childhood, which included sea urchins and moonlight and public speaking from age 8 for his father, the popular socialist prime minister. It included watching his father being carried from their home by the secret police; watching his mother wait for his father to return from jail; living in exile in Canada; and, last but not least, enduring the rage and ambition of the man we all read about in the newspaper. The son holds his own against that father, which actually makes the book hold its own under the weight of history and the fickleness of memory.

HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD. By Kiran Desai (Atlantic Monthly Press: 208 pp., $23)

Hullabaloo is right. Here is a novel created by an explosion of magical realism, a perfect defense of the notion that anything taken to its extreme turns into its opposite. The sheer effort to be weird, to create unbelievable characters in social contortions, unfortunately shows, rendering the unbelievable commonplace, the rebellious bourgeois, the unpredictable predictable.

The young son of a middle-class Indian family, infected one day by the spirit of a guava fruit, leaves his good job at the post office and takes to the trees, much like Italo Calvino’s Baron. (Too much like Calvino’s Baron.) His family bathes and feeds him from below. They offer him a wife. Because he was privy as a post office clerk to town secrets that he now delivers to gathering crowds, he is transformed by popular will into a spiritual leader. “Post office clerk climbs tree,” his father reads in the paper, “his child-like ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom.” The book has its charms, but it is too tightly reined in. This kind of writing calls for some abandonment, not irony, on the part of the author.

HECATE: The Adventure of Catherine Crachat: I / VAGADU: The Adventure of Catherine Crachat: II. By Pierre Jean Jouve . Translated from the French by Lydia Davis (The Marlboro Press/Northwestern: 175 pp. and 145 pp., $24.95 each)

Written in 1928, “Hecate” and its sequel, “Vagadu,” recall a limb of French literature in which debauchery, decadence and hypno-eroticism were played out to their no-good ends. We have tasted the fruit, and it is rotten! say the French. People are crushed by the weight of their obsessions, lovers commit suicide, women are ruined, cultures decline. How, in God’s name, one wonders, did people have the time to carry out these chaise longue nightmares?

These are the trials and tribulations, largely amorous, of Catherine Crachat (literally, Catherine Spit), Parisian actress and heart-stopping beauty. There are admirers, men in trains, women who chase her through the streets and, finally, the painter, Pierre Indemini, who breaks her heart. “I’m an adventuress,” she says. “If you’re old, you want to sleep with me. . . If you’re young, you shrug your shoulders . . . you find stormy women tiresome. . . . I’m a child who wants to cry.”

In “Hecate,” the corrupt Baroness Fanny Felicitas Hohenstein tries to seduce Catherine into a threesome with Pierre; in “Vagadu,” Catherine tries to recover from the loss of her friend and her lover by trying new relationships. She is punished for this by losing her hold on reality. Lydia Davis, in her translation, captures the humor at the eye of this sturm und drang. In “Vagadu,” Catherine depends on her male psychiatrist to teach her “what has always been, my secret, me.” Davis knows that any great heroine (especially one created by an author under the fresh spell of Freud), who lives a life of love and passion must also have a sense of humor.