DISCOVERIES

Island of the Dead

A Novel

Jean Fremon

Translated from the French

by Cole Swensen

Green Integer: 282 pp.,

$12.95 paper

“Discoveries, like poems, are a moment of inattention, a stain on the tablecloth made by an overturned glass, the fortuitous passage from one form to another,” writes Jean Fremon in his novel “Island of the Dead.” Got a question? Need advice? Fremon has put the answer in here somewhere. Of course aphorisms do not a novel make, but literature is the best medium for showing how the mind works, how it hops and clings to fact and fantasy alike.

In “Island of the Dead,” we find ourselves in the mind of a painter who thinks aloud. When he addresses us, it is in the tone of an overbearing but generous uncle. “You’d prefer a novel, not a treatise,” he admits, but he doesn’t oblige. The story of his love affair with Gertrude, who left him for his enemy, Thomas, will have to supply the arc. Fremon introduces us to his characters: Karl, “passionate advocate of disinterestedness;” and Sam, head of the local zoo, who resembles Samuel Beckett (“Bitter condor,” “eagle with periwinkle eyes”); and Gertrude, who writes letters from Tunisia, but like any narcissist’s object of affection, she’s not quite whole. Our narrator spends a lot of time in a botanical garden painting caricatures. Caricatures are perfect for our painter. After all, he thinks, “without form, spirits wander,” and his drawings are all about form. His mind may wander, but it always comes back to “with whom I took tea.”

He’s trying hard to forget Gertrude and to shake free of his own mind. He cannot sleep, so he takes pills: “I broke with insomnia as with an old mistress.” He’s fond of naturalist ephemera; the central nervous systems of loons, for example, and “inertia of evolution” fascinate him. He has firm ideas about writing: “Sense grounded in the pit of the sentence; sense as the ballast of the sentence. Of course, a sentence that has no sense has no weight, but a sentence entirely taken up by its sense, such as a simple command, has no weight either. It’s the subtle sense, the volatile and ungraspable sense that gives a sentence its weight. The magic formula or incantation, praise, prayer, nursery rhyme.” Part Foucault, part “I Ching,” part narcissist marooned. It shows how shallow, how deep, how desperate, how alive the human mind can be.

*

Envy

A Novel

Yuri Olesha

Translated from the Russian

by Marian Schwartz

New York Review Books: 148 pp.,

$12.95 paper

This novel, a survivor, first was published in 1927, just as Stalin and the Bolsheviks began in earnest to stifle the arts. Russian novelist and dramatist Yuri Olesha was 28 when he wrote it, dripping with juicy, corrosive, furious sarcasm. His was a generation with no way out, and this makes “Envy” a true pressure-cooker of a novel.

The main character is Andre Petrovich Babichev, director of the Food Industry Trust and “a great sausage-and-pastry man and a chef.” The novel’s conscience, Nikolai Kavalerov, is “his jester.” Kavalerov hates with a passion the jovial Babichev, gourmand, bureaucrat, comrade extraordinaire. Babichev once extended an unconscious arm to the drunken, homeless, pathetic Kavalerov, but after lending him the sofa for a few nights (linen sheets with bone buttons on the duvet cover), Babichev has very little use for him.

Babichev (think Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt”) represents the brave new world in which a humble sausage-maker can create an empire. Kavalerov has no ties to the world, institutional or otherwise. At 27, he survives on pure envy: “Here a drama must unfold, one of those grandiose dramas in the theatre of history that have evoked mankind’s lament, ecstasy, sympathy, and fury. Without even knowing it, you are a bearer of a historical mission. You are a clot, so to speak. A clot of envy in the dying era’s bloodstream. The dying era envies the era that’s coming to take its place.”

Babichev is a buffoon, but he’s a buffoon with a historic niche. He’s a man of his times. Kavalerov, like his creator, has no place in his culture, no possibilities, no vision, no dreams.