Discoveries

King Cophetua: Julien Gracq; Translated from the French by Ingeborg M. Kohn; Turtle Point Press: 96 pp.; $12.95 paper

A young soldier steps off a train in Braye La Foret in France. He has been invited to visit his friend, Lt. Jacques Neuil. No one is waiting for him at the station. He walks to the house of the aviator and avant-garde composer. It is raining, and his arthritic joints ache from so much time spent in damp trenches. It is All Saints’ Day 1917, and there is gunfire in the distance. At the house, the maid meets him. Their steps crunch on the gravel. She leads him to the music room-office, where he waits for several hours, noticing every object, every gleaming surface. She makes him dinner. They are alone in the big house. He notices a painting of the Moorish King Cophetua. These moments of waiting for Neuil, with the rain and the guns in the distance, are absolutely edible and delicious in this newly translated novella first published in 1970. His soul, “numbed by the prolonged shock of crude images and worn out by years of violent blows, was wide open to premonitions, like hope caught in a dead end.” He follows the silent woman to bed and, bluntly put, she fixes him. The next morning is clear and fresh; there is a bit of hope where before there was none. That’s it. That’s all there is.

*

Carmen’s Rust, A Novel; Ana Maria del Rio; Translated from the Spanish by Michael J. Lazzara; Overlook Duckworth: 112 pp., $21.95

DICTATORSHIP begins at home -- one of the many hidden messages in this 1986 novel of Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Instead of a country, we have a large estate, a house whose rooms are filled with forgetful uncles, stevedores, a grandmother with arrhythmia, a girl and her half-brother. And Aunt Malva, the source of rigid order, finder of spots and enemy of moral corruption. Between piano lessons and bleached laundry, the half-siblings break many rules and a few taboos. Carmen -- “with her savage black eyes, wending her way through the fissures of anything prohibited” -- is identified as the source of their incestuous impulses and is banished to her room. She is visited by a priest, confesses daily, grows thin and comes to believe in her own guilt. While “pigeons melt under cornices,” the country’s men, women and children are quietly “disappeared.” Carmen is only one of many victims.

*

Charlie Johnson in the Flames, A Novel; Michael Ignatieff

Grove Press: 192 pp., $22

ALL three of these short novels share an authenticity of detail that suggests the authors have lived through and seen these events firsthand, not in a book or magazine or movie. That is one of the things that makes them so effective. Charlie Johnson has been a war correspondent for 30 years. He is created by former broadcast journalist, author and Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff, who himself has been a war correspondent for 30 years. Charlie knows all the ironies of war, all the irrationalities and most of the horrors, but when the TV journalist watches a soldier pour gasoline on a 25-year-old woman and set her on fire in Kosovo, his career takes an irreversible turn. He runs into the road, puts his arms around her, burns his hands as he puts the fire out, gets the woman medical help and watches her die. He babbles incoherently for a few days, tells his story to a woman who is not his wife, craves the healing of women and then wants revenge. Jacek, his Polish cameraman and partner, has the scene on tape. Together they try to find the man who set the woman on fire. The man turns out to be a major war criminal. Finding him is the only thing that matters anymore to Charlie, who blows off his marriage and his job in the process. Here is a story fraught with the perils of cliche that never once feels forced or false. Oh, yeah, we think, slapping our foreheads. We’re supposed to remember that evil is banal. But Ignatieff’s storytelling is too powerful.