DISCOVERIES

Ingrid Caven

A Novel

Jean-Jacques Schuhl,

Translated from the French

by Michael Pye

City Lights: 248 pp., $12.95 paper

Adolf HITLER, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yves Saint Laurent -- German-born cabaret singer Ingrid Caven’s life flowed around these icons of 20th century European counterculture. Caven was married to Fassbinder and starred in many of his movies; she was Saint Laurent’s model and muse. At 4 1/2, she sang “Silent Night” in the barracks for the German troops. This novel, by her current lover and based on her life, is a collage of that strange postwar period in Europe of high artifice, drugs, terrorism, leather jackets and cinema. Behind the glamorous backdrop of hotel rooms, the Brasserie Lipp, the Rue de Bac, the clothing by Saint Laurent, Issey Miyake and others, you can still smell cities burning, lives decaying. Artists drape themselves over rich American producers and patrons. The “era of Potsdam and Sans-Souci ... matching plates and Meissen dancers” is over. But so is the era of cabaret, and Caven finds herself a relic: “The time of stars and divas was long gone, and haute couture was disappearing, too.... Why go on singing when all the voices have been flattened, standardized, synthesized?”

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Small g

A Summer Idyll

Patricia Highsmith

Norton: 310 pp., $24.95

Over her life, Patricia Highsmith wrote more than 20 books, beginning with “Strangers on a Train,” which Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie. She also created Tom Ripley, who first appeared in her 1955 novel, “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Her 1953 novel, “The Price of Salt,” was written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan and, perhaps more explicitly than her other novels, explored the lives of homosexuals. The title of this novel first published in England in 1995, the year of her death, refers to a guidebook designation indicating a “partially gay clientele.” Jakob’s Biergarten is such a place. It becomes a sort of living room for the family that her characters gradually form. Rickie, 46, is a gay man whose 20-year-old lover, Petey, has been stabbed to death as the novel opens. Rickie befriends a young seamstress, Luisa, who also was in love with Petey, and maintains a politely hostile relationship with the neighborhood’s grande dame, Renate, a jealous and possessive designer. Gay-bashing is the novel’s dark repoussoir, a constant threat to these decent lives. When another of Rickie’s friends is stabbed (this one’s straight), he sets out to find who is behind the hatred. The novel moves gesture by gesture, morning ritual to afternoon meeting. Highsmith’s meticulous descriptions, somewhat stiff at first, build to create a feeling of intimacy with her characters. Like Ripley, they burn in a reader’s memory.

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Black Clock

Vol. 1, March-September 2004

Edited by Steve Erickson

California Institute of the Arts:

158 pp., $12

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The Los Angeles

Review

Vol. 1, January, 2004

Edited by Kate Gale

Red Hen Press: 304 pp., $14

Two magazines grace Southern California’s literary landscape. Black Clock, stylish, fast, minimally illustrated, embodies Los Angeles’ fascination with voice and shadow: “Mystery date, I felt up your history” begins Arielle Greenberg’s poem, “Private, I.” Pieces by Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace are a little self-conscious, a little self-dazzled, but the overall effect is dry and new. The Los Angeles Review embodies our dowdy earnest side. There are pieces by Benjamin Saltman, Patricia Hampl, Deena Metzger on one hand, but there also is a burst of new Angeleno voices with Apache/Comanche, Filipino, Argentine, African backgrounds. They aren’t as polished as the voices in Black Clock, but they bring their own charge. Ryan Tranquilla’s “On Getting a Second Tattoo at the Tenth Anniversary of My First” or “Zilchy-Poo” by Anonymous reveal a process more than a finished product.