DISCOVERIES

All That Is Gone

Stories

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Translated from the Indonesian by Willem Samuels

Hyperion: 256 pp., $23.95

NEWLY translated tales in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “All That Is Gone” offer a child’s eye view of Indonesia in flux, politically, socially, culturally and environmentally. From a boy’s perspective on Sukarno’s rise to power and the nationalist self-sufficiency movement to his circumcision to become a “real Muslim,” only to find that he feels no different after the ceremony than before, Toer simply, elegantly traces an emerging political consciousness. When a friend and neighbor is married at the age of 8, beaten and raped by her new husband who then divorces her at the age of 9, her screams permeate his childhood. The writing flows as if in real time, inexorably; the characters are alike in their inability to change anything. In “Revenge,” the boy, now a soldier, sees an angry mob beat and kill an elderly pilgrim accused of spying for the British. “Overhead, the stars twinkled peacefully,” he thinks. “Each and every weapon that had ever existed played a role in destroying that man.... I no longer knew what I was feeling.” It is a story of faintheartedness, his own, the narrator tells us, “a simple tale -- yes, with as much simplicity as a tattered cloth or a dead cat in the middle of the road -- and, very likely, one that should not be told.” Toer paid heavily for telling his tales in novels and stories, in prison and out.

*

Ibid

A Life

Mark Dunn

MacAdam/Cage: 272 pp., $22

A writer gives the only copy of his manuscript, a biography of three-legged circus performer, entrepreneur and humanitarian Jonathan Blashette, to his editor. “I had a second copy,” Mark Dunn writes in an accompanying note, “but it was accidentally shredded along with the other typescripts given to my friend Ellen Zeisler. I was curious to see how her new shredding machine worked.” When the editor’s 3-year-old son dumps the pages into a running bath complete with bath powders, two years of work becomes an unpublishable purple stew. The editor offers to publish the notes; the result is “Ibid,” a novel in footnotes, from the doctor’s notes on the patient’s birth in 1888 in Pettiville, Ark. -- the doctor observes that the patient will probably walk sooner than his peers, citing the comparative stability of a three-leg stool -- to Blashette’s death in 1962. For many readers, footnotes can inspire fear and heighten attention, qualities that make “Ibid” unbearably hilarious. Mentions of Blashette’s ancestors, including his maternal grandfather (“a tailor in a village of seamstresses”); his brief but formative experience in the circus and his meeting with Christina, the one-legged woman in Andrew Wyeth’s painting, “Christina’s World” are just a few of the funnier episodes. Nasty notes to competing biographers give a feeling of authenticity (“ludicrously contrived, yet too deliciously accoutered”). “History can be more than dry facts and dates,” Dunn writes in his acknowledgment. “Wasn’t it Mary Todd Lincoln who privately remarked, ‘I wonder how the play turned out.’ ”

*

Educating Alice

Adventures of a Curious Woman

Alice Steinbach

Random House: 288 pp., $24.95

Pinch me. A former feature writer for the Baltimore Sun travels around the world taking cooking lessons at the Ritz in Paris, learning how to be a geisha in Kyoto, studying art in Florence and architecture in Havana, gardening in Provence, writing in Prague and raising border collies in Scotland. Then Alice Steinbach writes about it. It’s outrageous, it is. Yet it’s hard to dislike this courageous dilettante whose finest moments are when she’s not in control -- when she falls (like another Alice) into some wonderful church in Florence, or a garden or a restaurant. Steinbach knows that the margins -- the side streets and early morning hours -- are where you pick up the clues for the scavenger hunt that is a traveler’s day. (A sequel detailing exactly how she got this book contract would be extremely valuable to her readers.)