DISCOVERIES

It’s James Joyce, back from the dead! The very fast mind, the pleading with humanity, the hate-filled humor, the love-filled humor, the chaotic honesty that you can’t trust (because Dave Eggers makes fun of every non-authentic thing down to the copyright page). But it doesn’t matter if you trust him or not, or does it? “Based on a True Story” says the fine print on the cover of this memoir. I mean, did his parents really both die of cancer within five weeks of one another? (What a clerk-like bureaucratic form-filing little question!) Did he really, at 21, take his 8-year-old brother away from Chicago to live in San Francisco, to raise him himself with a vigor and empathy and flexibility that only a very young, very smart person could possibly have? And he’s got some Proust in him, the little 29-year-old-jerk, he’s got the trammeling thoroughness of Proust’s observation, his honest observations of artifice. The book is fine and different for earnest reasons, too: it is refreshing, for instance, to watch someone in the terrifying, death-defying act of parenting who doesn’t have to pretend he knows every last yuppie thing about child-rearing or convince everyone what a good parent he is just by meeting deadlines and being on time. He starts a magazine; he keeps his friend John from killing himself; he just wants to be naked again with all his friends from high school. He worries that he never gave his parents a decent burial. He says everything he thinks about lying and death and love (he loves that little brother so much). How generous of him to write this for us, to reveal all this so fearlessly, like Joyce, like Proust. (Net total payment after agent’s fees and sundries: a mere “$39,567.68”.)

TIGERS IN THE SNOW; By Peter Matthiessen; North Point Press: 186 pp., $27

“The sun set at last over Manchuria, and the deep blue of the wild horizon was fired by a dragon light of crimson. To the east, where night had fallen over the Japan sea, Orion rode on a clear void of black sky.” And he describes the thin ice of a cold morning in the Russian Far East: “pewter glaze on the rigid river.” Peter Matthiessen’s precise, evocative language is why Maurice Hornocker, foremost authority on great cats and founder of the Siberian Tiger Project, in his efforts to save the Amur tigers from extinction, invited the author to visit. Matthiessen, who has written extensively about wildlife and the suffocating lack of it, came in 1995 to the Sikhote-Alin State Biosphere Reserve, an area the size of Yosemite 300 miles east of Vladivostok. In 1985, 450 Siberian or Manchurian tigers lived in this much reduced range, the Amur Ussuri watershed. By 1989, after the fall of the Soviet government, wildlife protection virtually halted and poachers killed roughly one-third of these tigers. (In this century the world’s tiger population dropped from estimates of 100,000 to 5,000 or lower.) The vivid photos, including a few of wild Siberian tigers, were taken by Hornocker. On several expeditions in the 1990s, Matthiessen visited tigers all over the world, and this book, written in a clear diplomatic, scientific tone (Matthiessen waxes as much if not more over the habitat than over the mythical majestic animals), details the biology, ecology and economics of tiger survival.

BLACKDEN; By Duncan McLean; W.W. Norton: 230 pp., $13 paper

Look out! Young Scotsman coming of age! Duncan McLean has a knack for imagining the one true soul sitting in the pub on a Friday night; for swirling him around in the foul language and hopeless futures of his peers, in the centrifuge of village life in modern-day Scotland and pulling out a well-tempered character who may never get farther than Aberdeen but will love well and work with a philosophy. What separates McLean from authors like Roddy Doyle and Magnus Mills, who share his dry, British Isles humor, is that McLean’s writing has more clods of Scottish earth clinging to it. Every fourth word is guessable but passing strange: “The track down from Goodman’s Croft was rutted with mud, kirned up into a furrow of dried dubs and sharn in the middle, with more muck flung onto the long grass and tangled whins that lined it all the way to its junction with the denside road.” Paddy is 18 in Blackden. Future unclear. Father dead of cancer, mother off somewhere for the weekend, leaving a flurry of notes. Auntie Heather plants the seed of a political idea on the Friday, and by the Sunday, Paddy is flung from his chums at the pub, from his job assisting an auctioneer (an “orra loon”), from his groinal attraction to Shona, from the mystical witches’ coven behind the kirk, flung right out of the centrifuge to God knows where. “I jumped up,” is the very last sentence. Maybe he’ll make it to Aberdeen.