DISCOVERIES

LIGHT ACTION IN THE CARIBBEAN Stories By Barry Lopez; Alfred A. Knopf: 162 pp., $22 Many writers begin their careers with short stories. Few decide not to write in any other form. Fewer still, after writing a couple of fat books, return to the form, older and wiser and with a deep respect for the wide-openness of the short story. Barry Lopez, like a bird bringing sticks back to build a nest, returns repeatedly to the short story after forays into nonfiction and essay collections. Like nests, his stories have enough integrity to hold rich ideas; little wisps fray off them, usually at the end; they totter high up in trees and survive fierce, mysterious winds. An inmate tells how he and his fellow prisoners renounced the gangs they were affiliated with on the outside for totem animals and how this returned to them their lost and secret souls; a man sees into the source of a deaf girl’s pain (a rape and a shot in the head) like a horizon he must head for; a young man in Peru inherits the passionate love letters of two saints from the 17th century; two yuppies die violent deaths in paradise. There is a lot of passage in these stories; the vision of a journey will come to a character, the vision of his own goodness and he will grow toward it or not. Lopez is one of our finest writers. The only thing that some may find a little troubling is his rock-hard morality; the right thing to do is pretty clear in most of his fiction. He’s too good to spell it out, but it sinks like a stone thrown in the center of his otherwise effervescent writing.

IN THE SNOW FOREST Three Novellas By Roy Parvin; W.W. Norton: 196 pp., $23.95

Roy Parvin writes as if he’s untying all the hard knots in his characters. Often he succeeds with the men, leaving them soft and wounded, but there’s almost always one knot left in the women that can’t be undone, some mysterious nexus of pain or lost love or the inevitable journey of children away from their mothers or the goodbye a woman must say at some point to her true self. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title novella of this stunning triptych. Set in Parvin’s backyard, the Trinity Alps, “In the Snow Forest” is the story of Darby, a sawyer from a long line of sawyers who tries to love a sad woman named Harper, a woman with a sick child and a lost love. It’s a tragic story, the kind that makes you think the world should just stop. In “Menno’s Granddaughter,” Lindsay, ex-wife of a famous writer, pays a visit to the new wife after the husband’s suicide. Parvin’s characters have a subtle American craziness, a wildness and unreachable-ness. They have marrow that even he can’t suck out, but he writes about their sweetness and potential in a hopeful, surprisingly generous way. *

THE HOUSE ON MOON LAKE By Francesca Duranti Translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Delphinium Books: 192 pp., $13.95

In stark contrast to the idealism of the previous two books, this cynical European novel features a translator full of self-pity who essentially writes his own death. Fabrizio Garrone, 38, is a cold, aristocratic intellectual who prefers his women tied up and his surroundings symmetrical. His best friend Mario is also his publisher. His girlfriend Fulvia is way too good for him. Fabrizio’s big break comes when he discovers an unknown novel (“The House on Moon Lake”) by a semi-known German writer from the turn of the century. He translates the novel and writes a biography of its author. When he cannot find the true identity of the author’s muse and mistress, he creates her: a creature composed of all the qualities he most hates and fears in women. When it is published, he becomes famous; his book becomes famous, and the fictional muse becomes famous, inspiring, for example, a line of clothing based on the stylish profile Garrone created. She is so famous that her creator wants to destroy her. One day, he gets a call from a woman who claims to be the granddaughter of the muse. He visits her at the house on Moon Lake. Big mistake. This is one of those novels in which literature is like a powerful god: We think we can tame it, but it decides the fate of those who are its minions. *

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING A DOG By Roger Grenier Translated from the French by Alice Kaplan; University of Chicago Press: 184 pp., $22

Something is missing from this potentially and occasionally charming collage of quotes and literary references to dogs. Perhaps it is a connection between ideas, something to elevate the collection above the level of pastiche. Some of its whimsical chapters provide an overarching idea, like the chapter entitled “Misanthropes”: “Loving dogs goes along, more or less, with despairing of humans.” It’s tough going for such a happy subject; a reader bumps along from quote to quote, longing for the author to tell more stories of his own dog, Ulysses, by far the best part of the book.