DISCOVERIES

The Sea Below

My Window

Ole Sarvig

Translated from the Danish

by Anni Whissen

Green Integer 72: 320 pp., $13.95

In my lifetime, American fiction seems to have become less about philosophy, moral questions and questions of identity and existence, and more about understanding the lives of others -- portrait painting in literary form. This in contrast to European fiction, which never seems to have lost its “why are we here,” or even, “are we really here” circuitry. For the Danes, certainly, existential angst has never gone out of fashion. In “The Sea Below My Window,” written in 1960 but only now translated into English, a woman wakes in a strange room in a strange bed overlooking the sea. She does not know who she is; the novel describes the process she goes through of piecing together enough information to make an identity.

Until she pieces the jigsaw together at the very end, she is floating in a sea of uncertainty that at times terrifies her. When there is no context a person can locate themselves in, life is truly like a play with props; the lines the characters speak are not as important as the meaning one senses behind them. Without an identity, instinct becomes extremely important. “But what can I lose?” the woman asks herself. “For what do I own? ... I have my existence, but what is that? Is it the fact that I sleep and wake up? ... Is my existence not rather that riddle I am to myself? And that danger I feel lying in wait for me?” This is not comfort fiction. It is unsettling, disorienting and thought-provoking.

*

Notes of a Baseball

Dreamer

Robert Mayer

Houghton Mifflin: 322 pp., $18

Robert Mayer “emerged from the womb a shortstop.” That was 1939, in the Bronx, one mile from Yankee Stadium, which did not keep Mayer from becoming a serious Dodger fan. “Born to an ancient tribe of sufferers,” he writes, “I had found my baseball home.” Each time the Dodgers lost, Mayer could not eat. As a result, he was a skinny kid in black high tops. The obsession with baseball became a lens through which Mayer saw America, history, the world and everything in it.

In 1957, when the Dodgers moved to L.A., Mayer, who hadn’t read the sports pages for four years, likened it to the pioneers heading west in search of greater fortunes. Women are also seen through the lens of baseball: “Rare is the woman who does not begrudge the time her husband spends watching baseball. I have been very fortunate: I have married two of them.” Religion too: “In the long-suffering acceptance of its genuine fans ... there is something of the Jewish faith. Its essence is this abiding loyalty, in bad times even more than in good.” Mayer could never put on a Yankees T-shirt, he avows -- he’d suffocate. “My sense of integrity would wither. And after that, my soul.”

*

Vanished Kingdoms

A Woman Explorer in Tibet, China and Mongolia 1921-1925

Mabel Cabot

Aperture: 200 pp., $35

In the 1920s, Janet Elliott Wulsin set out with her naturalist/explorer husband on an expedition through Tibet, China and Mongolia, specimen collecting and recording anthropological, architectural and biological details for the National Geographic Society. Janet, despite her privileged upbringing, was a better writer and more adventurous spirit than her husband. Together they set out with 28 camels, six horses, nine trunks and 11 pieces of hand luggage for Peking, then across the Alashan Desert, 450 miles into Mongolia, then by raft on the Yellow River to Tibet.

The couple learned Chinese and discovered vanishing tribes. Their pictures are thrilling and romantic: Janet in various native costumes, the insides of temples never before photographed, Chinese friends made along the way (sunglasses, boots, rustic camps also make this a costume designer’s fantasy of a book) -- these photographs complement the text. Janet proved her mettle, all right, graduating from the status of being a “pocket wife” to a woman who, her husband wrote, “makes every place she comes to alive.”