A Bed in HeavenTessa de LooTranslated from...

A Bed in Heaven

Tessa de Loo

Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke

Soho Press: 144 pp., $21

Some stories make no attempt to apologize for the chaos and kismet of existence. This fascinating novel begins in an unraveled state and is formed as the story unfolds. In the first scene, the narrator, Kata, reveals that she has just buried her father and is in bed with her father’s son. History and the Holocaust swirl through her life as she tries to understand the stories of her Hungarian ancestors.

Then she meets Stefan, a German, and falls in love. When she meets his mother and tells her last name, the mother reveals that she hid a Jew in her house with that same name during the war. It was the narrator’s father. During the affair, Stefan’s mother took a German officer for her lover as well. Stefan grows up believing he is the son of the German officer until his mother reveals to him, when he is 20, that he is in fact the son of Kata’s father. The result is yet another way to understand the effects of war, the tangled, muddled absurdity of it, how its traces remain in the blood for generations.

*

The Island

Martinique

John Edgar Wideman

National Geographic: 208 pp., $20

“THE parts of this book, with their various modes of narrative representation, are attempts to allow myself to be invaded, to live in other skins, to assume risks.” That is the sound of a writer letting go, of John Edgar Wideman throwing himself into something else and into himself. It is the sound of a writer saying, this time, I’m not going to control the writing the way I usually do; for better or worse, this is the raw me on the page.

It is a privilege to watch an accomplished writer do this: to transcend our expectations and the expectations of the form -- in this case travel writing -- to watch the self slam up against the world. Wideman was asked to write about any place in the world, and he chose Martinique, the 417-square-mile slavery-haunted island with 375,000 residents. An American writer of African descent, Wideman travels to Martinique with his lover, a white French woman. In so many ways, he offers himself up on the half shell, exploring his new love, exploring the ghosts of slaves and masters on the island while trying to let its beauty and music undo him as well.

In “The Island,” he imagines being traded; he tries to understand the nature of that power over another human being; he watches his own sweat drip on the page. He writes about making love, merging, blending. He thinks about possession and jealousy; he is overcome with rage, and he is embarrassed.

“Writers can be the worst kind of colonizers,” he writes, “ruthlessly taking over and exploiting a place for their own purposes.” Wideman is 60, and at that age, this kind of unraveling is revealing. Layer by layer, we get to the heart of the artist, which helps us understand his body of work. It’s not always worth it. With Wideman, it is.

*

Diary of a Djinn

Gini Alhadeff

Pantheon: 272 pp., $22

“DIARY of a Djinn” is also about undoing and undressing. The narrator of this novel, born in Egypt, moves through a life that seems like many different lives: muse to a fashion designer in Milan, student at a boarding school in Florence and mistress of a married man in New York. It’s a life she thinks of as a djinn’s, a spirit in Muslim legend that can skip “from body to body and dies for none. The body is to a djinn its human bottle ... a spirit is locked in one for the precise purpose of undoing its knots.” In an odd way, “Diary” is a showcase for Gini Alhadeff’s unique sensibility: a blend of the exotic with the merely rich. The novel is written in the first person, with third person interludes as the djinn’s alter ego tries to protect her from bad situations and relationships. When a writer abandons reality for the mystical subconscious, it’s a lurch. All the rules of time and space and voice and identity are up for grabs.