Discoveries

Bohemian Manifesto

Field Guide to Living on the Edge

Laren Stover, with illustrations by Izak

Bulfinch Press: 288 pp., $19.95

First, it’s elegant: heavy, silky paper; colorful but understated watercolor illustrations. Second, it’s amusing. Laren Stover (“The Bombshell Manual of Style”) was never, she admits, a bombshell. “I am a Bohemian. This started ... when I was a fetus in New York City. My parents lived in a coldwater flat on the Bowery.” She wore a “yellow thrift-shop hat and a fuchsia jacket I found in a trash can on Christopher Street” to her first job interview. Bohemians are “willing to suffer for their beliefs, their art. They don’t sell out.” But just being poor doesn’t make you one. “Bohemians ... create new work and change paradigms.” When Starbucks and the Gap move into the neighborhood, “Bohemians move out.” Stover catalogs the boho way of life: clothing, names, health and hygiene, hair, cuisine. (“Bohemians are easily distracted while cooking. The impulse to write a haiku ... a call from overseas ... may result in burning the chickpeas that soaked for two days, pasta boiled until mush, chicken necks reduced to a gelatinous goo.”) A 24-hour sample menu consists mostly of coffee, beer, chocolate and fortune cookies. Various Bohemian types are described: the nouveau, the gypsy, the beat, the zen, the dandy (with illustrations of each). There are lists of movies, music, books, and, for the uncommitted, one headed “Bohemian Lite” with more accessible works, like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” There’s even a Bohemian astrology. This is a playful manifesto.

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Candide

Or, Optimism

Voltaire, translated from the French by Peter Constantine

Modern Library: 144 pp., $19.95

Speaking of playful, this effervescent tale, written in 1759, continues to delight and surprise. Thus, translations of Voltaire’s most famous work get lighter, simpler, more accessible -- so much so that one imagines the original disappearing someday with a pop! into the heavens. As Peter Constantine writes in a biographical note, Voltaire was always in trouble for insulting a benefactor or member of the aristocracy. Off he went to another court, across another border. Hotfooted, a fugitive from all who took themselves too seriously, he thumbed his nose at philosophers and kings from a new, more comfortable roost. Candide, too naive to make fun of anyone, just bumbles from disaster to disaster, clutching Pangloss’ words to his chest: “Everything is for the best.” Floggings, shipwrecks, hangings -- all for the best. Everyone’s a target for Voltaire’s wit; no heroes here. And in the end, only work saves us: “Work keeps three great evils at bay: boredom, vice and want.” “We must,” says Candide at book’s end, “cultivate our garden.” With each new translation of this classic, a new moral emerges: Experience is ephemeral. There are no morals. Like tools, the best books grow more useful with handling.

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Asleep in the Sun

A Novel

Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine

New York Review Books: 172 pp., $12.95 paper

“One can’t even understand oneself,” thinks Lucio, our everyman, “seen by others, any confused man acts like a clown.” Lucio, who fixes clocks for a living, is truly confused. He loves his shrewish wife, Diana, though women possess a level of irascible awareness he finds disturbing. He sees life as “an anguished obstacle course,” especially when “the missus” becomes so obsessed with dogs that he’s persuaded to check her into a mental hospital. Evil doings there: experiments in which souls (inspired by Descartes, the doctors have located the soul in a gland at the base of the neck) are transplanted into dogs. Diana’s soul is lodged in a pointer, who escapes. “Asleep in the Sun” is part morality tale, part exuberant havoc and, as James Sallis writes in an introduction, part “cautionary science fiction.” Casares (1914-1999) lived in Buenos Aires and was a close friend of Jorge Luis Borges. “Asleep in the Sun,” his sixth novel, was written in 1973.