DISCOVERIES

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Duchess of Nothing

A Novel

Heather McGowan

Bloomsbury: 224 pp., $23.95

“I am not above breakfast now and then,” admits this most fabulous woman, part Holly Golightly, part Auntie Mame, part Eloise all growed up, “a real breakfast I mean, not just a cigarette.” “Chairs will be the death of me,” she mutters as she trips over yet another one. Somehow, she has become the companion of her lover’s 7-year-old brother, referred to as “Edmund’s brother” or, more simply, “the boy.”

Edmund of the beautiful back. Edmund the painter who is not too bright but nonetheless wooed her from her husband (a haunted Bavarian) and her job at the bank. Beauty is fatal, she tells the boy as they spend their days in cafes and wandering the streets of Rome. The boy writes it all down in his green notebook. The two begin their day lounging in bed, thinking of pleasant things for 45 minutes. She takes the boy to bars; they try to find the zoo, but end up looking at domesticated animals out for a walk in the city. She is bored with Edmund, “to the brink of sadism,” and even tries to leave him (and the boy), but she makes it only as far as the courtyard in front of the house, where she falls asleep.

Shortly thereafter, Edmund skips town, leaving them an envelope full of money (perhaps it is because she is a hard woman who never made him a pie, the proprietor of their neighborhood cafe advises). She buys sunglasses for herself (to “[s]tave off these harbingers of death that surround us”) and a blazer for the boy, since all schoolboys must wear blazers, although she is dead set against the idea of school, that “prison of chalkboards.” She recalls her life for Edmund’s brother while he continues to take notes; a past in which she drank hot tea and “read books that featured protagonists contemplating views with hot drinks.” She offers the boy all her warmth and wisdom; there seems to be some relationship between intelligence and body odor, they agree. “Have faith in ignorance,” she tells him.

This woman without a name is so marvelous, so wise and ditzy, so committed to the pure spirit of this abandoned boy that you cannot help but fall utterly in love with her. Edmund sends for them both, full of assurances that he loves her. But it is the boy who has stolen her heart: “Don’t be awed by stars,” she tells him. “But, in looking up, I ask that you never feel your finite shell. I ask that you never feel small and mortal or insignificant.”

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The Three Way Tavern

Selected Poems

Ko Un

Translated from the Korean by Clare You and Richard Silberg

University of California Press: 154 pp., $45; $16.95 paper

“A people descended from the Bear-mother,” Gary Snyder writes in his foreword to this collection of Korean writer Ko Un’s poetry. Snyder describes “a high civilization where women shamans play a role in religious life,” a country “that honors a Confucian practice older and purer than whatever’s left in China or Japan.” Into this ring of praise for Korean culture steps Ko Un, born in 1933, a man who saw countless relatives and neighbors killed in the Korean War, was a monk for a decade, then left the monastery, taught school, wrote poetry (more than 100 published volumes in 45 years) and essays and fiction, went to jail for criticizing the South Korean government’s treatment of the poor and now lives in the quiet village of Majung, where he writes poems about the old nettle tree and the green barley fields and the pheasants, poems full of what his translator Clare You calls “ultimate emptiness.”

Snyder praises Ko Un’s “purity,” his “nervy clarity,” his “heart of compassion” and his “deep dharma wit,” all qualities that grow sharper and more in evidence in the later poems, like “By the Window”: “What else could I wish for? / There is a faraway place and / a place close at hand.” And “Confession,” in which the poet-monk admits: “I fear writing, / sails blown full of arrogance.” The poems from “The Whisper,” Ko Un’s 1998 collection, are poems of spring, the next life, changes in spirit and form: “I won’t come back as a human,” the poet insists in “Afterlife.” “For the afterlife, / an animal will do. / Not a big one; / small will do. / Even / so small it can hardly be seen. / An amoeba will do.”