DISCOVERIES

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Gotz and Meyer

A Novel

David Albahari

Harcourt: 170 pp., $23

GOTZ and Meyer, Meyer and Gotz -- interchangeable, indistinguishable, they were real men, fictionalized by David Albahari’s narrator, a schoolteacher. Gotz and Meyer were bus drivers in Belgrade during World War II. Twice a day, they drove their bus, a traveling gas chamber, each time carrying 100 Jews (mostly women and children) from the Fairgrounds concentration camp, across the river to the place where Serbian prisoners would unload and bury the bodies. In this manner, 5,000 people were killed.

Albahari’s narrator follows the truncated branches of his own family tree, imagining the many who disappeared from the Fairgrounds. He tries to convey the depth of his bewilderment to his students, taking them on a field trip in a school bus he re-creates as the bus that carried so many to their deaths. “[Y]ou keep imagining reality as if it were an artwork in which you have a choice,” he muses, “while in the tangible world there is no choice, you have to participate, you cannot step out of what is going on and into something else.” The narrator is inhabited by Gotz and Meyer, Meyer and Gotz -- and by the souls he imagines in the back of the truck: “[A]ll those young and old dead people are filling me, choking me, how they cluster like wasps on the hemoglobin in my blood.”

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Bouvard and Pecuchet

A Novel

Gustave Flaubert, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

Dalkey Archive: 328 pp., $13.95 paper

THIS is the novel that killed Gustave Flaubert. Eight years after beginning it on Saturday, Aug. 1, 1872, with much fanfare, letters to his colleague Ivan Turgenev, etc. (this is a book more written about than published), the author died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at age 58. It may be that his research in agronomy, politics, grammar, history, art (not to mention how to make a fine anisette) -- 1,500 volumes’ worth for this novel alone! -- did him in. His brain exploded. All in the name of satire, for Bouvard and Pecuchet are bureaucrats and boobs, a type of middle-class Frenchman that Flaubert hated with special venom. They are know-it-alls: funny to us, onerous to Flaubert. Both are clerks, wedded to their habits, Bouvard a little more expansive, Pecuchet a little more neurotic. They meet one day on a city bench and cannot get enough of each other. Bouvard inherits money, buys a farm, and the two retire together. Various newfangled farming techniques are tried; all fail. Everything they touch withers on the vine. The locals are delighted by the spectacle.

After several years and much dead vegetation, they indulge their passion for philosophy. “What is taste?” asks Bouvard, in one such discussion. “[I]n the end, taste is taste -- and none of that tells us how to have it.” Therein lies the downfall of Bouvard and Pecuchet, who, viewed through Southern California’s rose-colored glasses, look a little ridiculous but for the most part happy -- certainly not worth a cerebral hemorrhage. This new translation comes with Flaubert’s “Catalogue of Fashionable Ideas” (“Defense of slavery”) and “Dictionary of Accepted Ideas”: “Academy (French): Scoff at it but try to join if possible.”

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Sky in a Bottle

Peter Pesic

MIT Press: 262 pp., $24.95

SO much of the art behind science lies in framing the question. Peter Pesic, a physicist and musician, follows one little question: “Why is the sky blue?” as it is considered by history’s greatest minds: Plato, Newton, Leonardo, Descartes, Kepler, Goethe, Ruskin and finally the little-known John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh, who noted definitively that the smaller (or bluer) the wavelength, the more scattered it will be. Pesic ends with an explanation of how ozone depletion has already changed the color of our sunsets: “Will it move people to think that the blue sky above them can be destroyed by human folly?” he asks. The Martian sky, he points out, is a dull ochre: “Perhaps it will give us pause to think that our children will inherit such a sky.”