All and nothing

ILAN STAVANS, scholar, historian, polyglot, theoretician of two diasporas, is one of those rare intellectuals who seems willing to try his hand at anything. One of the most vital voices of Latino scholarship, Stavans has, in the last 15 years, pursued an astonishingly diverse set of interests. He has mined with great lucidity his own life story to produce the acclaimed memoir “On Borrowed Words,” and his examination of Latino identity, “The Hispanic Condition,” is taught at college campuses all over the United States. He has written a study on Cantinflas, the Mexican comedic genius, and has co-authored a comic strip history of Latinos in the U.S. He has dissected the work of Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, meditated upon his own passion for dictionaries, explored the art of translation and, perhaps most audaciously, attempted to explain and even codify the emerging dialects of Spanglish.

His editorial interests are similarly catholic: Stavans founded the groundbreaking (though now-defunct) journal Hopscotch, has lent his expertise to projects such as “Tropical Synagogues” (an anthology of stories by Jewish Latin American writers) and is the editor of the Library of America’s complete stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Endlessly prolific, Stavans is to be admired for his intellectual restlessness. And though his many various projects have been of uneven quality, his oeuvre, taken as a whole, reveals the workings of an inquisitive, enthusiastic and engaged mind.

In “The Disappearance,” his second collection of short fiction, Stavans is again concerned with the multiple meanings of Jewish and Latino identity. Of the three pieces that make up this slim volume, the title story is the best: a fine piece of Borgesian literary sleuthing concerning the staged kidnapping of a Jewish actor in Belgium. A fictional correspondent narrates and interprets the startling events, creating a real sense of tension, though in the end the piece feels less like a finished story and more like the summary of one. The story “Xerox Man” is slight to the point of barely registering, its most interesting aspects cribbed -- as Stavans notes in the preface and in the story itself -- from a profile in Harper’s. That article, about a deranged Jewish New Yorker who becomes archivist, thief and vandal to some of the rarest books of Judaica, sounds remarkable indeed, but Stavans’ flimsy fictional architecture does little to deepen, explain or dramatize the mystery.

The stories of “The Disappearance” read as if they were dashed off: This harried quality is most apparent in the longest piece, the novella “Morirse esta en hebreo.” That story opens with the death of Moishe Tartakovsky, a first-generation Mexican Jew, whose funeral exposes the many myths that had surrounded this larger-than-life patriarch. With an expansive cast of characters, numerous subplots (a contested will, for instance, along with a bank robbery, a few religious misunderstandings and an affair) and set against the backdrop of the calamitous 2000 Mexican presidential elections, “Morirse esta en hebreo” is the collection’s most ambitious -- and its most disappointing.

Characters appear and fade without leaving much of an impression, and Stavans seems to think that listing his characters’ vital statistics -- Moishe’s daughter, Esther, for instance, is “a well-rounded forty-eight-year-old woman of gentle manners who walked pigeon-toed” -- will make them memorable. When more significant players get the same treatment -- “An athletic fifty-one-year-old with a virile physique, his hairline rapidly receding, Berele was famous for ...” -- we feel we are in the hands of an amateur.

To make matters worse, Stavans is determined to conflate the political transformation taking place in Mexico -- the 2000 elections, when the dominant PRI was ousted from power -- with the intimate drama of Moishe’s passing. Lest readers fail to make the connections on their own, the narration is quick to offer a shouted “¡Viva Mexico!” from the tumultuous streets at various conveniently meaningful moments. When Moishe’s former mistress, “a svelte, dark-skinned, fifty-three-year old mestiza,” arrives and tells the family about her affair with Moishe, the future president of Mexico unexpectedly comments on the drama: “From a loudspeaker on Calle Hegel, Vicente Fox’s triumphant voice, sounding self-confident, was heard outside the apartment: ‘The age of innocence is over.’ ”

In the preface to “The Disappearance,” Stavans makes a great deal of his search for exact language, declaring himself “allergic to verbal excess” and committed to the purging of “fake embellishments.” Most writers would not disagree, though many would not need a page and a half -- or quotes from Flaubert, Twain and Wittgenstein -- to explain why. I couldn’t help but recall Stavans’ exceptional introduction to the 1998 anthology “Prospero’s Mirror: A Translator’s Portfolio,” in which he astutely describes the psychological borders of language and the differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin American approaches to it: “ ... to the north, a methodical, puritan culture, perfectly suited for its mathematical English; to the south, a culture of confusion using Spanish and Portuguese, ill-conceived Romance languages designed for romance, remorse, and melancholy.”

There is dismayingly little of that beautiful confusion, that romance, that remorse or melancholy in “The Disappearance.” Though it is interesting to see Stavans wrestle in fiction with the same issues he devotes his intellectual energies to, “The Disappearance” ultimately lacks the punch of his best scholarly work. These stories are useful only in the context of Stavans’ notable career -- if seen as simply another way of becoming acquainted with the voice of an influential American thinker. *