DISCOVERIES

THE LAST NIGHT I SPENT WITH YOU By Mayra Montero Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman; HarperCollins: 128 pp., $23 Sometimes a book is just a vessel for some other form of communication. “The Last Night I Spent With You,” for example, by Mayra Montero, the Cuban-born author of “In the Palm of Darkness” and “The Messenger,” is a pitcher of sex. It is over-the-counter literary erotica, not to be read while commuting or lying on the beach or in a cafe where you might do something stupid. Privacy is called for here. Ostensibly the novel’s overcoat is a story about a long-married couple in their 50s whose passions are rekindled on a good old-fashioned cruise. Not, however, for each other. He meets a harp player and plays out several fantasies in full view of his wife, and she goes off the boat in several ports-of-call to find well-endowed natives. Under the overcoat lie sex scene after sex scene, the imaginative, fantastic, mythical kind. The writing provides just enough connection between the minds and memories of the characters and their genitals to provide depth and context. Drink up, as they say, it’s getting on time to close.

YOU CAN’T CATCH DEATH A Daughter’s Memoir By Ianthe Brautigan; St. Martin’s Press: 176 pp., $21.95

Named for a mountain violet in a poem by Shelley, Ianthe was 24 when her father, Richard Brautigan (author of 11 novels, most famously, “Trout Fishing in America,” nine books of poetry and one collection of short stories), shot himself at 49. Ianthe had lived through decades of his drinking and several instances when he had threatened to kill himself. She had begged him not to; she had been, sometimes, his proclaimed reason for living. In spite of his sketchy fathering, she loved him like the daughter of a king: his physical grace, his unusual appearance, his humor, his power. Brautigan and his wife divorced when she was 3 and Ianthe was raised by her father; in his Geary Street apartment in San Francisco, in Bolinas and finally on his Montana ranch, where drinking took over his life. To his daughter, he claimed his binges were the only way to clear his mind of cobwebs. Ianthe never figures out why her father killed himself; “You Can’t Catch Death” is not a book of answers. You feel you’ve lost a son, a canny therapist tells her, and now, finally, he is safe.

AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN By Richard Brautigan; St. Martin’s Press: 112 pp., $17.95

This is the last of Richard Brautigan’s novels, found by his daughter after his suicide in 1984. It’s a wandering, obviously unfinished novel, a meditation upon but not about a woman who has hanged herself. That image sits in the center of the book like a bowl of fruit in a still life, but its story is never told. This is the legendary bravery of the beats: the connections between the dots are often left undrawn. Things, details and thoughts seem to align themselves, pointing to true north, to meaning, if--and only if--the writer is a good compass. To be a good compass takes honesty. Writers like Brautigan and Kerouac in the late ‘50s and ‘60s worked hard to step outside the American current, outside the rat race. Brautigan makes frequent reference to the effort of staying still (on true north) in this novel of his mind’s wandering. His contagious valor makes you notice details (like the kitchen table so reminiscent of the writing of Virginia Woolf and Raymond Carver, an emblem of stillness) you might never have. In the end, he could quiet his mind only by dying.

THE CAMINO A Journey of the Spirit By Shirley MacLaine; Pocket Books: 320 pp., $24.95

Books about pilgrimages are irresistible: You don’t have to do the walking; some generous bodhisattva will describe it for you! Shirley MacLaine, at 60, dives into the unknown (this time a 30-day walk across northern Spain) from a different point than most of us. Chased by paparazzi much of the way, she finds that her celebrity is heavy baggage. The Santiago de Compostela Camino extends more than 500 miles, beginning in France, crossing the Pyrenees, then going west across Spain to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of St. James are buried. Self-motivation and complete surrender to God are the lessons of the journey, also rumored to offer many chances for romance along the road and insight into romantic problems. One of MacLaine’s questions, pondered as she walks, is the connection between sexual identity, spirituality and God, essentially, what are the uses of passion and why do we suffer so in love? Early in the pilgrimage, an 8th century cleric named John, comes to her while she is resting under a tree, guiding her with visions of her Moorish past and providing her with a new creation story, in which men and women were once united in the same body. I admire her courage, to move forward, as she writes, “by going within.”