DISCOVERIES

Cut Time

An Education at the Fights

Carlo Rotella

Houghton Mifflin: 222 pp., $24

Just when you think it’s all been written, a good writer takes a shining new look at an old subject and breathes life into it. “The deeper you go into the fights,” writes professor and journalist Carlo Rotella, “the more you may discover about things that would seem at first blush to have nothing to do with boxing.”

Rotella writes with such easy Bostonian grace, such good timing, that a reader finds new value in the very metaphors he uses to punctuate his story. (A “dry gulch with a frying pan” acts as a period, “sucker punch,” a comma.)

Reporting from ringside, Rotella is spattered with blood: “[I]t’s cut time ... spectators, too, shamed and fascinated, plunge headlong into cut time.” Perhaps Rotella’s greatest contribution to the literature on boxing is the way he makes a sort of peace between the show biz aspects and the real drama and importance, “the places where force precedes meaning.”

Rotella takes boxing out of the ring, even “the prefight ring walk, like my grandmother’s walk to [the grocery store] or to church or to the cemetery, offers a compressed rendition of the fighter’s path through the larger world.”

He can look at a boxer and tell that he “has treated the task of winning in the ring as a zero-sum process of taking his share away from other people.”

Rotella, who is in his 30s, has preserved the blow-by-blow and the grandeur of another age but has somehow expanded the ring to include his own generation’s proclivities and sensitivity.

*

My Name Is Light

Elsa Osorio

Translated from the Spanish

by Catherine Jagoe

Bloomsbury: 356 pp., $15.95

Here is a novel that requires a recovery period, so horrifying are the cruelties, real and imagined, fiction and non-, of the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina. The story is fractured and difficult to piece together. It takes about 50 pages before one understands the relationships among the characters, but from then on their crimes and kindnesses are as indelibly engraved in our minds as they are in each others’.

Luz grows up the daughter of wealthy parents from a military family, never knowing that her real mother and father were among the desaparecidos, political activists who disappeared in the ‘70s. Her mother, she learns, was pregnant in prison and was forced to give her up. The girlfriend of a brutal officer had tried to help her and the baby escape but failed. Years later, Luz finds her father, presumed dead, in Madrid and tells him the story of her mother, his lover.

Everywhere she turns, Luz, whose search for her father drives the novel, comes up against corruption. Col. Alfonso Dufau, the man who stole her from her mother, works hard to keep her true identity a secret.

“The word ‘power’ begins to work its way up Alfonso’s body. He’s never seen it so clearly as in the last few months, while they’ve been cleansing the country.... If he has power over death, why not also over life?”

The novel shifts between voices, which is confusing but matches the general disorientation of the times. It also adds to a reader’s sense of the struggle to overcome chaos and set lives so terribly altered by war to right again.

*

Pastries

Bharti Kirchner

St. Martin’s Press: 352 pp., $24.95

This comparatively benign confection of a novel also involves war, but on an entirely different scale. Sunya, a young woman of Indian descent, has followed her heart’s desire and her mother’s unfulfilled dreams to open a bakery in Seattle.

Sure enough, the evil conglomerate, Cakes Plus, opens a store nearby and threatens Sunya’s livelihood. The secret recipe for her most successful pastry, the Sunya cake, is sought by her competition, especially by an unethical journalist on the Cakes Plus payroll. Seattle, a town where food is taken very seriously, is the perfect backdrop for a pastry war.