Discoveries

Tattoo for a Slave

Hortense Calisher

Harcourt: 336 pp., $24

“Only trust the inanimate,” Hortense Calisher muses in her latest memoir, while recalling the two kinds of cupcakes she ate as a child -- one frothy and over-iced, the other small and underdecorated -- the two of them representing, respectively, the lavish German and prim Southern strains of her ancestry.

Calisher, who grew up in New York City, here considers her slave-owning Jewish forebears. Her father was born in Richmond, Va., in 1861. His family were carpetbaggers who started a soap and perfume business.

“Trust the inanimate” could well be the Calisher manifesto. This book -- like her previous memoirs, chock-full of suede-lined travel trunks and china and linen skirts -- reminds the reader of a musty Manhattan apartment at a very good address, whose accouterments practically shout at the visitor in their nasal cacophony. Each detail fights for meaning on the page.

Calisher’s asides and innuendos, but for the winsome beauty of her words, often threaten to torpedo the text. For example: “Loose-breasted mamas incarnate ... suckling their young with ambition’s ichor.” But here’s the rub: There is guilt uncovered in the novel’s archeology -- guilt scraped clean at the very end, dusted off and ready to assume pride of place on a shelf in the next memoir.

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Casanova in Bolzano

A Novel

Sandor Marai, translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes

Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $22

In 1756, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova escaped from the Leads, the damp Venetian prison where he had been incarcerated for 16 long months. “It was at Mestre,” this deliriously gorgeous novel begins, “he stopped thinking; the dissolute friar, Balbi, had very nearly let the police get wind of him....”

At an inn in Bolzano, Casanova finally gets his first good night’s sleep in well over a year. He awakens to discover that a group of women has gathered just outside his keyhole. “Most men,” the author writes, “were as ridiculous as roosters.” However, “here was a man who was genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more, the way an oak tree is just an oak tree and a rock is simply a rock.”

It is not long before the Duke of Parma, whose young wife fell in love with Casanova before the duke had him dispatched to prison, comes around to pay the fugitive a visit. He offers Casanova any amount of money to force the duchess to fall out of love, and gives him a single evening to accomplish this feat, under penalty of immediate return to prison.

Needless to say, it cannot be done. What rich, simple writing! What a clear translation! How absolutely delightful!

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Television

A Novel

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Jordan Stump

Dalkey Archive Press: 168 pp., $12.95 paper

“Lying there peacefully in Halensee Park, I reflected that, if your goal is to write, not writing is surely at least as important as writing. But that you should be careful not to overdo it (because that’s the one little risk I might be running these days).”

Who can resist filling the empty void of “not writing” with something -- with anything? Certainly not the hero of “Television,” a scholar with a grant to write a book about Titian.

After banishing his wife and child for the summer, after giving up television (as soon as the Tour de France has ended), our scholar at last gets down to writing. “Indeed, in these moments of profound vulnerability, as our bodies and minds steel themselves for the task to come, our newly vigilant senses ... “ And not writing.

Several weeks later, he has his opening words: “When Mosset” -- but now an invasive self-involvement begins creeping in, rather like a fungus. The urge to watch television increases, but our scholar resists. “I admire that about myself,” he admits. Instead, he reads the television section in the local newspaper.