Discoveries

Where the Long Grass Bends: Stories

Neela Vaswani

Sarabande Books: 276 pp., $13.95 paper

The names of trees we’ve never seen (the pipal tree, where bats hang); foods we’ve never eaten (“The spirit wants to drink a salty lassi”); and qualities we’ve never valued (“He is crazy, but he bounces on the balls of his feet when he walks and no one who does that can be bad”) are like keys to kingdoms. In Neela Vaswani’s stories set in India, “Where the Long Grass Bends,” certain phrases make excellent sense: “I do not count my mother as a person I have met because she seems to be a part of me, someone who was always there, someone who will always remain,” thinks the girl in “Twang (Release).” But in “Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh,” where women go weekly to be exorcised of demons, spirit voices speak, and it is as if our author, has gone voodoo on us. In some stories there is a Rudyard Kipling feel; in others you must imagine the “opinions of the wool.” In “Bolero,” Vaswani slips into a T.S. Eliot trance: “In the crowd at Topkapi Palace / my father said: ‘I feel Turkish.’ / I remember the room of clocks, / ticking in tune, / Swiss, German, and French.” Kipling and Eliot are excellent footholds, but you can close the book if you find you’ve wandered too far.

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Eleni, or Nobody: A Novel

Rhea Galanaki, translated from the Greek by David Connolly

Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press: 186 pp., $25.95

This novel is based on the life of Greece’s first recognized woman painter, Eleni Altamoura-Boukoura. When nuns forbade her to paint, her wealthy sea-captain father found a teacher so that she could pursue her art. At 17, dressed as a young man, she went to Italy to study and met her future husband, painter Francesco Saverio Altamura. The story and setting alone are captivating and Eleni -- willful, passionate, never still -- is memorable. The best parts by far are about her early island years. Her time in Italy and depictions of her dressed as a boy, then as a determined woman are a little too baroque: “For whole afternoons I would watch the ceramic sea of Florence steaming hazily. For whole nights I would surrender myself sleepless to the interminable, tenderest voyage of the andante.”

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At War

Flann O’Brien

Dalkey Archive Press: 192 pp., $13.95 paper

Reading “At War,” you’ll be grateful that wits like Flann O’Brien’s never die. John Wyse Jackson has edited this volume culled from O’Brien’s Irish Times’ columns titled “Cruiskeen Lawn,” usually translated as “The Full Little Jug,” a phrase from Irish drinking songs. Its author, Brian O’Nolan, a civil servant (until he was fired in 1950), used O’Brien as a pseudonym. The column’s main character was named Myles, after horse dealer Myles na gCopaleen in Dion Boucicault’s 1860 melodrama “The Colleen Bawn.” Myles goes to the dentist, he gives advice to parents about Santa Claus, he makes endless fun of Ireland’s literary set: “Corduroys,” he explains in a footnote, “Aesthete, verse-speaker or other member of the bearded class; from the legwear characteristically worn by same.” He makes jokes: “Suppose you were, early one morning, to leave the so-called Empire.... Wouldn’t the British be just a little bit sorry? ... And where to go? Well, there is one idea. Set up house in the middle of the mild blue Mediterranean, become hot Latin persons.”

He often rants: “Just as we go to press (What do you want? Who? He’s not in) just as we go to press I learn another of my books has been banned. (What? Leave them in the corner there. No, he didn’t leave any empties for you) Now this is monstrous. It is monstrous, monstrous, do you hear me, to suppose that I COULD submit to having my writing, my riting, man, choked, stifled, thwarted and stunted by these anonymous smut-glutted muck-butchers.... (Here, run out and get me one and tenpence worth, it’s near ten).”