DISCOVERIES

What is the moral usefulness of fiction? What are its moral limits? When a writer creates incest and murder, what is he or she asking of us? That we judge and forgive him? That we watch him forgive himself? That we look at our own lives and play our actions out on a mental stage so hypothetical it may as well be fiction? In “The Blue Bedspread,” sister and brother find solace in each other, find escape from their violent father. As they grow older, escape becomes sex. Sister marries, kills husband; other things happen that aren’t supposed to happen, things that in real life will get you in big trouble. But this is fiction: One can tell the truth. Or pretend to tell the truth and not get in trouble. When given a problem, we readers often try to judge it. For this, we need facts, preferably in chronological order, highly detailed. Raj Kamal Jha scrambles the evidence in “The Blue Bedspread.” He plays with our desire to judge and solve. The result is frustrating, unsettling, illuminating. The point of view is erratic; now a child’s, now a brother’s, now an adult’s. Judgment, in real life, should be this complicated, this risky and difficult. Then, we might all do it less readily.

MY QUEST FOR THE YETI, Confronting the Himalaya’s Deepest Mystery By Reinhold Messner Translated from the German by Peter Constantine; St. Martin’s Press: 169 pp., $23.95

“Legends have moved whole nations and kept them together,” Reinhold Messner writes of his quest for the Yeti, “and it was legend that fired my curiosity.” Messner’s first encounter was in 1986, in bright moonlight, on a trek from Qamdo in Eastern Tibet south to Nachu. Five to seven feet tall, a hulking bear man that moved through the forest without making a sound, it eclipsed everything else in Messner’s mind. The question, for Messner (who was the first person to climb Mt. Everest without oxygen, one among his many climbing conquests), is not whether the Yeti exists--he collects its many names: Tibetan snow bear, dremo, mete and, in the West, abominable snowman--but whether it represents a truncated branch in the evolutionary tree. (Messner believes it is not in fact a mysterious form of Homo sapiens but a real animal, the stuff of many legends.) Perhaps most compelling in “My Quest for the Yeti” is Messner’s love of Tibet, his fears for it under Chinese rule and his concern that rampant deforestation may kill the animal’s habitat, even if it cannot kill the myth.

JANET, MY MOTHER, AND ME, A Memoir of Growing Up With Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray By William Murray; Simon & Schuster: 318 pp., $24

It’s too good to be true. Sneaker and sand dune summers on Fire Island, winter in Capri, seduction by a Italian countesses, private schools in New York, the best and brightest adults Manhattan has to offer to guide you through your education and vocation. A little maternal suffocation now and then, but other than that it’s Noel Coward all the way to the beach. William Murray was raised by his mother, Italian born Natalia Danesi Murray, journalist and radio reporter; her mother, Mammina Ester, a war correspondent; and Janet Flanner, The New Yorker writer and author of the famous Letters from Paris before and after World War II and legendary profiles of Hitler, Isadora Duncan, Henri Philippe Petain (head of the Vichy government), Thomas Mann, Wendell Wilkie and others. Murray has written for The New Yorker for 33 years, often from Italy. Here he spins a generous confecionery memoir of the Italian voices from his childhood.

HUSSEIN, An Entertainment By Patrick O’Brian; W.W. Norton: 288 pp., $23.95

Patrick O’Brian had a life even before the sea engulfed his imagination and forced him to tell its story. “Hussein” is incontrovertible proof that before O’Brian became O’Brian, he was Rudyard Kipling. Written in 1938, it is a tale set during the British Raj, with all its formality, graciousness and fury. Hussein is a young mahout, or elephant handler, a lifetime profession and also a calling. Done well, the mahout gains not rupees but a powerful ally; a shortcut to the gods, a prop for con jobs (mainly snake charming) and a very big brother to stomp out competing suitors. Hussein falls in love with Sashiya and has his brutal competitor murdered using a fakir’s curse. But he could not have done it without Jehangir, his elephant, who also saves him from wild dogs, leopards, wild bees, tigers and snakes. Every orphan should have Jehangir for his family. For many lifetimes readers, I am sure, nothing will bring the creatures and myths of childhood back faster than an imaginary journey to gallant India with O’Brian as a guide.