Discoveries

Huerfano

A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture

Roberta Price

University of Massachusetts, Press: 352 pp., $29.95

Ignore the picture on the cover of the naked woman hugging an enormous bundle of marijuana. This memoir of life in one of the great communes of the West is better than that -- and for many people a road not taken that is fascinating to read about. In 1968, Roberta Price, age 24, and her graduate school sweetheart, David, left their promising academic lives (Roberta had gone to Vassar, David to Yale; they met at SUNY Buffalo) and went west to join the Libre commune in the Huerfano Valley of southeastern Colorado and build a home on its 360 collectively owned acres. The couple had actively protested the Vietnam War and experienced all the filial tensions that broke up so many families back then. Over the next decade they built their home and lived on what little money they scraped together doing odd jobs and making music. The core group grew from six members in 1968 to 300 by 1974, surviving harsh winters, the death of a child, births, infidelities, suicides and a few breakdowns. For Price, monogamy was the tradition most difficult to defy. Libre was no Utopia, but its members were committed and it felt more like family than the nuclear kind. And yes, they smoked a lot of grass and hash. Alcohol and LSD were pretty common too. By the time Allen Ginsberg came for a visit, Price was ready to leave. “We were,” she concludes, “heroic fools or foolish heroes -- I can’t say which.” Sweet children, with a sweet, sweet dream.

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Lenz

A Novella

Georg Buchner, translated from the German by Richard Sieburth

Archipelago Books: 150 pp., $14 paper

First published in 1839, “Lenz” is a novella based on three weeks in the tortured life (1751 to 1792) of the schizophrenic Livonian playwright J.M.R. Lenz. This new translation includes two important additions: a section from the diary of the pastor J.F. Oberlin, who took care of Lenz for several weeks, and a portion of Goethe’s memoirs. (The two writers were friends in their early 20s.) Translator Richard Sieburth calls it “a cubist portrait painted from several perspectives at once,” but the most striking is Buchner’s original novella. Authors such as Rimbaud and Canetti were haunted by its intensity. Lenz’s madness is acute; he finds refuge in Oberlin’s household but is unbearably sensitive to every sound, emotion, flicker of light. “Only one thing remains, an infinite beauty passing from form to form, eternally unfolding,” he thinks in a calm moment. “Now I feel so confined... sometimes I feel as if my hands were hitting up against the sky; O I’m suffocating!” he cries in another. And sometimes he is so lucid that Goethe dismisses his madness as a “species of self-torture which, in the absence of any external or social constraints, was then the order of the day, afflicting precisely those possessed of the most exceptional minds.”

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Out of My Head

A Novel

Didier van Cauwelaert, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

Other Press: 164 pp., $18

“It’s insane how quickly you can get used to absurdity,” thinks the hero of this disorienting thriller. “I’m still sure of being me, but I’m less and less sure of everyone else.” Martin Harris, a botanist from Yale, is on his way to his new posting in Paris when his taxi is hit by a truck. He wakes in the hospital three days later. On his release, he goes to his apartment, where he finds his wife with another man who claims to be the real Martin Harris. Our narrator has no money, no papers, nothing to prove his identity. His wife claims never to have seen him before. The new Martin Harris has all the right memories. The police, his boss, everyone believes the impostor. A private detective finds that there is no record of a Martin Harris at all. A doctor says it’s a case of post-comatose identity disorder -- or, more mysteriously, that Harris has been imprinted with someone else’s memory. This is well-mined territory, but Van Cauwelaert gives it such a credible twist that a reader feels nervous, vulnerable and more than a little confused.