Discoveries

The Quarry

A Novel

Damon GaIgut

Grove Press/Black Cat: 176 pp.,

$13 paper

First published 10 years ago in South Africa but not elsewhere until now, “The Quarry” has the same dry, feral quality as Damon Galgut’s best-known novel, “The Good Doctor.” Galgut’s landscape reminds a reader of Breyten Breytenbach’s South Africa without the overt politics -- roads leading to some vanishing point, the feeling of pursuit. It opens with a nameless traveler getting a ride from a minister who is on his way to a new parish in a nameless village. The traveler kills the minister, dumps his body in a quarry, dons his cassock and drives to the village.

The parishioners, who live in an airless and rigid social structure, enjoy his sermons. When the body of the real minister is found, two local brothers are blamed and brought to trial. It is a familiar story; the false minister, the issues of guilt, injustice and redemption give the novel a biblical feel. The writing shines in its peripheral vision, in the backdrops and corners of its scenes: The courtroom spectators “gave off a sound without seeming to produce it just as bees do or water”; the dead insects on a windshield, “their legs and feelers ... composed in attitudes of violent expiry.”

“The Quarry” also makes us keenly aware of our own scrutiny. It’s the quantum theory of literature: The characters are changed by our watching them; we are players in this novel.

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Natural Novel

A Novel

Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Zornitsa Hristova

Dalkey Archive Press: 136 pp., $12.50 paper

“Flaubert once dreamed of writing a book about nothing, a book without content, ‘a book that would be held together by ... itself by the internal force of its style just as the Earth is suspended in air without any support.’ ” So does Georgi Gospodinov -- or his hero, a 30-year-old man on the brink of divorce, which terrifies him. So much so that he allows his mind (and his pen) to latch on to anything: the possibility of a novel of verbs, of flies, of beginnings, toilets, cats, lists of pleasures. “He collects stories,” the epigraph to one chapter reads, “but he himself doesn’t have any.”

One is struck as much by the author’s effort to be unsentimental as by his hero’s denial of divorce. This toughness, even at the expense of plot, characterizes recent Eastern European writing, as though writers under the age of 40 did not want to be identified with previous generations of teary-eyed soldiers, politicos and lovers. The inertia of daily life also seems a heavier burden, particularly in urban novels such as this one. (Though the location is nameless, it is a “capital” city.)

“How can a novel be possible these days,” thinks the narrator, as if in response to this tendency, “when we no longer have a sense of the tragic? How can even the idea of a novel be possible when the sublime is gone and all we have is everyday life?”

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Whore

A Novel

Nelly Arcan

Grove Press/Black Cat: 192 pp., $12 paper

I am hesitant to include this powerful novel, which Nelly Arcan admits in a prologue is autobiographical, because its author is so clearly distraught and because the sex is not only graphic but also relentlessly empty. Arcan, born in Canada, had a religious education. Her father was devout, her mother a bedridden invalid. (“Mothers are like caged birds.”) Her home was haunted by the ghost of a sister, Cynthia, who died at 8 months, before the author was born. She studied piano, became a barmaid, then answered an ad for an escort service in Montreal, where, at age 20, calling herself Cynthia, she had up to eight clients per day, earning enough (at $50 per half-hour) to study literature at a local college. One looks for a reason for her having chosen a profession that makes her feel isolated, angry and sad. Perhaps it is “my inability not to die from my mother’s degradation,” she writes in one of many statements so brutal that a reader almost cannot believe them. “Whore” is raw data -- too raw, even for fiction.