DISCOVERIES

Written Lives

Javier Marias, translated from

the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

New Directions: 200 pp., $22.95

JOSEPH CONRAD “wore a monocle and disliked poetry,” hated Fyodor Dostoevsky, loved cigarettes and his yellow-and-white striped bathrobe. Isak Dinesen didn’t live on a diet of oysters and champagne (which doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t); she also ate “prawns, asparagus, grapes, and tea.” Robert Louis Stevenson once set fire to a tree by accident, then ran away as the entire forest burned.

In “Written Lives,” Javier Marias weaves thousands of glittering bits into the most gorgeous portraits, each two to five pages long. His only criteria in choosing 26 writers from around the world was that they be dead, for although nothing in these essays is invented, several are “embellished.”

Marias adds his interpretations: “There is about the figure of Robert Louis Stevenson a touch of chivalry and angelic purity, which, if taken too far, can verge on the cloying.” Each is titled like a painting: “Ivan Turgenev in His Sadness,” “Thomas Mann in His Suffering,” and “Nabokov in Raptures.” All, for the most part, are very funny. (The vision of Giuseppe Lampedusa with his satchel of teacakes and books all mashed together, dressed so elegantly, is indelible.)

*

Voices From a Time

A Novel

Silvia Bonucci, translated from

the Italian by Martha King

Steerforth Press: 184 pp.,

$12.95 paper

FIN de siecle Europe is often rendered beautiful in its decay and death rattle -- what followed was pure evil and destruction. Fiction written in this period is some of the best, sweetest and most tragic we have. Silvia Bonucci’s “Voices From a Time” belongs among these works.

Set in the European cities of Trieste, Genoa, Paris and Vienna, as well as Cairo, it is the story of Gemma, a beautiful, self-centered socialite mother; Sandrin, her quiet, supportive husband; their sickly son, Marcello, the oldest, born in 1898; his little sister, Dolly, and the youngest son, Titti. The constellation of characters is dominated by Gemma, whose unpredictable behavior creates different neuroses in those around her.

The novel is written from each family member’s perspective, which, when combined with the gravitational pull of the coming war years, creates an alarming feeling, like being trapped on a merry-go-round where each rider contributes to the frenzy of speed and none can get off.

*

America, a Prophecy

The Sparrow Reader

Edited by Marcus Boon

Soft Skull Press:

288 pp., $15.95 paper

IT’S high time that Sparrow, the poet, journalist and “prose-provocateur,” was dragged into the harsh commercial light of day. This way we can pick over the refuse of his political and cultural commentary and say that he was better back in the ‘70s when he wrote for a Manhattan weekly, and in the early days of the Unbearables Assembling Magazine, the Literary Supplement of the Revolutionary Poultry Overview (pro-Poland) and the New Yorker (after browbeating, protesting and generally badgering poetry editor Alice Quinn).

But that wouldn’t be true. As the collection “America, a Prophecy” shows, Sparrow (a.k.a. Michael Gorelick) just gets better and better. It’s wall-to-wall laughter, beginning with his praise for spammers; his travels outside New York (where “every main street is like a Kandinsky-that-went-wrong”) and “Barbie, A Memoir,” in which he reveals that Barbie, whom he met when she was 25, was “a speed freak” and “she only spoke of Ken once.”

Much of the work is New York-centric, such as “My Cockroach Diary” and Sparrow’s brief essay on every New York building in which he’s had sex. There’s also media commentary, including spoofs on New Yorker poetry (“Perfection Wasted,” which begins “And another regrettable thing about death.... “), and interviews with such luminaries as Dan Quayle, Saddam Hussein and Dr. Ruth, not to mention advice: “There is a Bad Poetry Explosion, and you can be a part of it.”