YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: LITERATURE

ARABIC Two years after the attack on his life by Islamic fundamentalists, the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz published Asda as-sirah ad-dhatiyyah ("Echoes of the Autobiography") in 1996. Other Egyptian novels included 'Ala` ad-Dib's Qamar 'ala al-mustanqa` ("A Moon on the Quagmire"), with insight into the Arab condition, and Ibrahim 'Abd al-Majid's La ahad yanam fi al-Iskandariyyah ("No One Sleeps in Alexandria"), a fascinating narrative with a historical dimension. Two first novels appeared: Muntasir al-Qaffash's Tasrih bi-'l-ghiyab ("Permission for Absence") and Said Nooh's Kulama ra`ayt binta hulwah aqul ya Su'ad ("Whenever I See a Beautiful Girl, I Cry Suad!"). The year's most fascinating novel from Lebanon was Iskandar Najjar's Durub al-hijrah ("Ways of Migration"), which recorded the tribulations of the country's European minority. Hasan Dawud's Sanat al-utumatik ("The Automated Year") and Muhammad Abi-Samra's Al-Rajul as-sabiq ("The Previous Man") were noted especially for their precision, narrative structure, and exploration of new experience. Bas al-awadim ("The Folk's Bus") was written jointly by Najwa Barakat, a Lebanese woman novelist, and Nasir Khumair, a Tunisian filmmaker. Morocco produced a number of novels rich in symbolism and experimental narrative, the most noted among them being Samasirat as-sarab ("The Middlemen of Mirage") by Salim Humaysh, Janub ar-ruh ("South of the Soul") by Muhammad al-Ash'ari, and Ra'ihat al-Jannah ("The Smell of Paradise") by Shu'ayb Halifi. Morocco also produced one of the year's most fascinating collections of short stories, Masharif at-tih ("Overlooking the Maze") by the talented woman writer Rab'a Rayhhan. The best short-story collection of the year was, without doubt, Sa'at maghrib ("Time of Sunset") by the distinguished Egyptian writer Muhammad al-Bisati, marked by poetic language and an apt perception of the contemporary condition. Sulayman Fayyad's Nubala` wa-awbash ("Noblemen and Riffraff") was a successful satire of the literary world. Noted collections of Arabic poetry in 1996 included those by Muhammad Salih, Rif'at Sallam, Imad Abu-Salih, and Muhammad Mutawalli, along with the poets of the avant-garde journal Locusts (Egypt); Yahya Jabir, 'Abduh Wazin, and Bassam Hajjar (Lebanon); Nuri al-Jarrah (Syria); and 'Abd al-Latif Lu'abi, Muhammad Binnis, M. Bin Talhah, Mahdi Khuraif, and Tiraibaq Ahmad (Morocco). For the first time since being banned in 1926, the unabridged Fi ash-Shi'r al-Jahili ("On Pre-Islamic Poetry") by Taha Husayn was republished. A number of Arabic writers died in 1996. They included the eminent Egyptian critic Fu'ad Duwwarah, who left his mark on the field of dramatic criticism in particular; the Israeli Arab writer Emile Habibi (see OBITUARIES); the Egyptian writer Salih Mursi, father of the Arabic novel of political espionage; the critic and journalist Ahmad Baha` ad-Din; Latifah az-Zayyat, the pioneer of women writers in Egypt; and 'Abd al-Hamid Benhadugah (see OBITUARIES), the father of modern Arabic literature in Algeria. (SABRY HAFEZ) CHINESE Chinese literature had an active year in 1996. This was particularly true of the novel, where, for example, the number of published works rose to between 800 and 900. First-rate works, however, were rare. The Nanjing author Zhou Meiseng published Renjian zhengdao ("The Way of Living in the World"), a work highly varied in its artistic techniques and dynamic descriptions. Some critics believed that Han Shaogong's novel Ma Qiao cidian ("Ma Qiao Dictionary") indicated the maturing of a new consciousness in Chinese literature; others thought that Han had created a new literary style. One critic later pointed out that the novel was an imitation of the Serbian writer Milerad Pavi's Khazar Dictionary. The number of experimental novels, appreciated by only a minority of readers, decreased in 1996. Writers were thus being forced into other directions, emphasizing story line, plot structure, and character development. Overall, however, the fevered atmosphere in novel writing, which was related to government interest and lucrative prize moneys, continued. It was not a good year for short stories, however. Some critics claimed that the short story had become the forgotten corner of the Chinese literary world or had sunk into a state of hibernation. Awards promoting the genre had little monetary value, and writers were thus often not interested. In poetry only a few good works were published in 1996. One was Wang Huairang's long poem Zhongguoren: buguide ren ("Chinese: A People Not on Its Knees"). Important journalistic literature included Zhangjiagang ren ("People of Zhangjiagang") and Chizi qinghuai ("Loyalty"). (QIAN ZHONGWEN) In Taiwan the literary market continued to be dominated by popular literature, both locally produced and in translation. Literary competitions remained active, with enthusiastic participation by both seasoned and new writers. In addition, journalistic literature had a significant year. (EDITORS) EASTERN EUROPEAN Overall, literary developments in Eastern Europe were quite eventful in 1996. It was a memorable year for Polish literature in particular. For the first time, the Nobel Prize was awarded to a Slavic woman poet, Wislawa Szymborska. (See NOBEL PRIZES.) A volume of Stanislaw Czycz's best-known short stories, revised just before his death in 1996 and entitled Ajol i Laor ("Ajol and Laor"), was published. It concluded with a lengthy interview of the author by Krzysztof Lisowski. A selection of Czeslaw Milosz's wartime essays, Legendy nowoczesnoshci ("Legends of Modernity"), in which he questioned certain modernist ideals and values, appeared. The second part of the volume consisted of his correspondence with Jerzy Andrzejewski from the same period. Milosz also published a biographical work of his late friend the poet Anna Swirszczynska, Cz to za goshcia mielishmy ("What a Guest We Had"). The growing presence of women's voices was exemplified by Urszula Koziol's volume of poetry Wielka pauza ("The Great Pause"). In it Koziol employed her traditional poetic devices, such as the use of dialogue and digressions, yet added new elements such as poems related to her journeys or based on classical myths and motifs. Anna Burzynska's novel Fabulant: Powiastka intertekstualna ("The Fabulist: An Intertextual Tale"), filled with quotations and parodies borrowed from classical or fashionable literary works, was considered one of the most interesting debuts of the year. In the South Slavic region, literature continued to be at the centre of cultural life. The NIN award, the most prestigious of Serbian literary awards, was given to Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic for her novel Bezdno ("Bottomless"). Velmar-Jankovic, who belonged to the generation of writers born before World War II, was considered the most powerful woman writer of Serbian literature. Her new novel was a historical work set in the second half of the 19th century in Serbia. Among her characters were members of the Obrenovic dynasty. The most important literary event of the year, however, was the publication of the late Borislav Pekic's essays Radjanje Atlantide ("The Birth of Atlantis"). Selected from his diaries after his death in 1992, they dealt partly with an account of the writing of his popular novel Atlantis. Another important collection of essays, Virtuelna Kabala ("The Virtual Kabbalah"), established Svetislav Basara as Serbia's foremost analyst of literary, historical, and cultural issues. The English translation by Bogdan Rakic and Stephen Dickey of Mesa Selimovic's Death and the Dervish filled an important gap in the literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although Selimovic's first-person narrative took place in the 18th century in Turkish-occupied Sarajevo, it conveyed a universal truth about the dilemma of humankind during times of crisis. The Dominik Tatarek Literary Award for the best book of the year went to Ivan Kadlecik for Hlavolamy ("Brain Twisters"). Kadlecik was a prose writer, essayist, and former dissident who in the 1970s had been banned from publishing in his country. His new book consisted of monologues, aphorisms, and tales that interwove lofty ideas with banal concerns. The literary scene in the Czech Republic remained as vigorous in 1996 as in previous years. One of the most popular contemporary Czech fiction writers, Michal Viewegh, published the novel castnc zjezdu ("The Excursion Participants"). It was a grotesque description of participants attending a convention and was filled with tragicomic effects. In poetry Petr Borkovec, representative of the younger generation of Czech poets, published his fourth volume of poetry, Mezi oknem, stolem a postel ("Between the Window, the Table, and the Bed"). Since 1989 a free press and the abolition of censorship had created a new period in the literary life of Romania. The most flourishing genre was nonfiction. Memoirs, diaries, and journals covering the period 1947-89 gave voice to the diverse experiences of a nation oppressed by the former communist regime. The trend was best epitomized by Mircea Zaiciu's Journal, an exceptionally vivid document whose third volume was published in 1996. Written from a personal point of view, it represented the tragedy of Romanian intellectuals silenced during the Nicolae Ceausescu regime. The unprecedented growth and interest in the political essay was another literary phenomenon. Horia-Roman Patapievici's book of essays Cerul vazut prin lentila ("The Sky Seen Through a Lens") best represented the genre. In it the author questioned the previously idealized Romanian identity shaken by the 1990 miners' "revolt." In May 1996 Patapievici received an award from the Writers Union (Premiile Uniunii Scriitorilor) for the best book written by a beginner. The Writers Union awards, covering 10 different categories, and the annual book fair in Bucharest, were the main events in 1996. The book fair not only served as a showcase of literary talent but also was an event in which the entire literary establishment participated. (BOZENA SHALLCROSS) ENGLISH One might ask how many years a reviewer could continue to employ Dickens's line about the age simultaneously being the best of times and the worst of times. With regard to the American publishing industry, the reviewer might say that it would be applicable as long as the slow burn of the current crisis continued. The anything-for-profit ethic of most editorial houses seemed to have proliferated in 1996, adding to the amount of swill that came out between hard covers and less than gently nudging more good work in the direction of smaller, independent houses outside New York City, toward hibernation, or, alas, toward oblivion altogether. With this said, however, there remained a great deal to celebrate in terms of new work by serious U.S. writers, a few of them with large followings, most of them with small but solid reputations, and some newcomers to the scene. The opening line "We were the Mulvaneys, remember us?" of Joyce Carol Oates's engrossing new novel, We Were the Mulvaneys, asked a question easily answered by any serious reader who finished the marvelously rendered story of an upstate New York farm torn apart by a sexual assault on the daughter of the household. The Mulvaneys are storybook people living in a storybook house, but their story is adult, deeply humane, heartrending, and beautiful. Anyone who read about them would remember them, and reviewers were nearly unanimous in their praise of the novel. Not so fortunate either in its execution or its reception was a new novel, her first in a dozen years, by the well-regarded writer Joan Didion. The Last Thing He Wanted, an opaque rendering of intrigue in the U.S. espionage community and its effect on the daughter of a retired spy, did little for Didion's reputation. Previously lauded novelist Jay McInerney did not do much better with his new novel, The Last of the Savages, which seemed to disappear from view almost immediately upon publication. Mona Simpson's novel A Regular Guy received a mixed response. Veteran novelist George Garrett published The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, an interesting and effective story that yoked crimes in a small Florida town some decades ago with the contemporary American soul. Richard Bausch brought out the evocatively titled Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea, a touching coming-of-age novel set in the 1960s. Vicki Covington published The Last Hotel for Women, a beautifully wrought novel about Birmingham, Ala., in the midst of the first freedom rides. The Here and Now by Robert Cohen was set in New York City and successfully illuminated the crisis in the soul of a depressed magazine editor in love with the wife of an Orthodox Jew. Certainly the most successful experimental novel of the year was David Markson's Reader's Block, a tour de force about an aging writer contemplating the composition of a new book even as he plots his own suicide. In The Visiting Physician, Susan Richards Shreve portrayed a small Midwestern town in the midst of a social crisis. Prolific young novelist Madison Smartt Bell's Ten Indians went to the heart of inner-city affairs. Supporting the Sky by Patricia Browning Griffith successfully took on the subject of middle-class life in Washington, D.C. In Going to the Sun, James McManus created an appealing narrator--a diabetic female graduate student from Chicago--who took readers on a bicycle trip along the northern rim of the U.S. David Madden carried readers back to East Tennessee and to Civil War battlefields in other areas in his episodic historical fiction Sharpshooter. Much farther afield was Manchu Palaces, Jeanne Larsen's third novelistic excursion into the history of China. Among the nominees for the National Book Award for Fiction were both good works and bad--specifically, Ron Hansen's flawed novel Atticus, set in southern Mexico, and Elizabeth McCracken's charming The Giant's House, which told the tale of an affair between a 26-year-old Cape Cod librarian and an appealing adolescent with a growth problem. Absent from the list of nominees, and stirring up some dust because of it, was the huge, sprawling experimental novel Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (see BIOGRAPHIES), a book tedious in the extreme but with a small cult following. In his moving first novel, Mason's Retreat, the acclaimed storywriter Christopher Tilghman took the estuaries and inlets of the eastern shore of Maryland as his setting, the years just before World War II as his time, and an Anglo-American family in turmoil as his subject. In her steamy first novel, Suspicious River, acclaimed poet Laura Kasischke followed the misfortunes of a promiscuous young woman in a northern Michigan town in the doldrums. Story writer Marly Swick transported readers back to the 1960s and into the midst of a Midwestern family in crisis in her fine first novel, Paper Wings. Among short-story collections published in 1996 was an auspicious first book by the Dominican-American writer Junot Daz, whose Drown included 10 clearly articulated coming-of-age tales set in the Dominican Republic and in northern New Jersey. There also was a wonderful last book, Ralph Ellison's Flying Home, posthumously published short fiction by one of the greatest novelists of the post-World War II period. The book was edited by the scholar John F. Callahan, who was preparing for publication the manuscript of Ellison's fabled second novel, which had remained unpublished, and possibly unfinished, at Ellison's death. Two highly regarded storywriters were represented by new collections--Andre Dubus with Dancing After Hours and Tobias Wolff with The Night in Question. Fantasy writer Ray Bradbury showed off his powers in Quicker than the Eye. Richard Bausch received a rare honour for a living American writer, seeing his Selected Stories appear in a Modern Library edition. Poet Gary Snyder made an already strong year for poetry a memorable one by offering Mountains and Rivers Without End, his cycle some 30 years in the writing. U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass produced a new book of lyric poems, Sun Under Wood, including the beautifully luminous "Dragonflies Mating," with its images of "steam rising from the pond the color of smoky topaz" and "a pair of delicate, copper-red, needle-fine insects" mating "in the unopened crown of a Shasta daisy." The Old Life--four short poems, three elegies, and a long poem--came from Donald Hall, and Maxine Kumin published Connecting the Dots. At the age of 83, the California poet Virginia Hamilton Adair made a much-publicized debut with Ants on the Melon. C.K. Williams's The Vigil was a striking new collection of his cerebral, long-line story poems. The 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Glck made her presence felt with Meadowlands, as did Henry Taylor with his new volume, Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996. Robert Pinsky, whose translation of Dante's Inferno had won him much praise in 1995, showed 30 years of his own work in The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996, by James McMichael also appeared. In the area of translation was Princeton classicist Robert Fagles's new version of the Odyssey. No single work of nonfiction stood out above the rest in a field of interesting and well-made books in 1996, though some of the subjects may have been more interesting than others to various readers and some higher in literary value. For example, among travel books there was William Langewiesche's engaging Sahara Unveiled. In Great Books readers heard how David Denby had gone back to his alma mater, Columbia University, and read his way through the core humanities course. Paul Hendrickson returned to the Vietnam War era in his biographical study The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War. James Howard Kunstler, author of the highly praised Geography of Nowhere (1993), continued his argument about planning for a livable American landscape in Home from Nowhere. Attorney and novelist Richard Dooling took an entertaining polemical stance in Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech, and Sexual Harassment. The year 1996 marked the death of the flamboyant and controversial fiction writer Harold Brodkey (see OBITUARIES) and the publication of This Wild Darkness, the journal he had kept to record the progress of his decline from AIDS. Among the living, the highly regarded essayist and fiction writer William Kittredge contributed a book-length essay titled Who Owns the West? Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko came out with a collection of disparate pieces--Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit--that ranged from the practical and biographical ("On Nonfiction Prose") to the lyrical ("An Essay on Rocks"). Phillip Lopate published a book of occasional essays titled Portrait of My Body. Less successful was California novelist William T. Vollmann's The Atlas, a series of multiple short takes on political upheaval, travel, sex, and art. Lynne Sharon Schwartz wrote about her experiences in Ruined by Reading. National Public Radio news show host Noah Adams described his quest to master a musical instrument in midlife in Piano Lessons. Classical pianist Russell Sherman wrote splendidly about musical matters in Piano Pieces. David Quammen did the same for biology and ecology in his essays on island species, The Song of the Dodo. A Queer Geography: Journey Toward a Sexual Self was Frank Browning's intelligent assay of homosexual mores around the West. Among autobiographical volumes Alfred Kazin's A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment stood out for its literary and historical interest. Author bell hooks took time out from the analysis of race and gender to write Bone Black, a memoir of a country childhood. Walter Bernstein looked back to a bad time in Inside Out, his memoir of the blacklist of the 1950s. Literary biographies flourished, with no set pattern to be discerned among them. Ralph Freedman completed Life of a Poet, his biography of Rainer Maria Rilke, which had been long in the making. Melville scholar Hershel Parker published the first volume of a new biography, Herman Melville. Melville and His Circle was the title of a book by William B. Dillingham about the author's reading in his last years. Brenda Wineapple wrote a dual biography in Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, as did Joan Mellen in Hellman and Hammett. Sheldon M. Novick challenged some of the views of biographer Leon Edel in Henry James: The Young Master. Jeffrey Meyers attacked the conventional wisdom about the U.S.'s greatest 20th-century poet in Robert Frost. Closer to contemporary times were James Park Sloan's Jerzy Kosinski and Jackson Benson's Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. While good literary biographies came off the presses in 1996, it was not a great year for literary criticism. Here and there the reader could find clear and useful insights, but these usually appeared in essay form rather than in book-length works. William H. Gass, for example, came out with Finding a Form, a collection of interesting and readable essays, including the brilliant "A Failing Grade for the Present Tense." Two editions of correspondence offered insight into the work of important 20th-century fiction writers--Matthew Bruccoli's The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 1925-1947, and Michael Steinman's The Happiness of Getting It Down Right: Letters of Frank O'Connor and William Maxwell, 1945-1966. Novelists Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse coedited the unpublished essays and notes of the late Bernard Malamud in Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work. Toni Morrison edited Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, a posthumous collection of stories and essays by Toni Cade Bambara. Dan Hofstadter's interesting study The Love Affair as a Work of Art fell more into the category of belles lettres than criticism. Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge was intellectual history, but Harold Bloom's Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection stood in a class by itself, part literary criticism, part theology, part polemic. The most controversial work of history during 1996 was Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which continued to cause a stir in Europe. Political biographies included Cary Reich's first volume of The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958. Richard Ford won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction with his novel Independence Day. Jorie Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection The Dream of the Unified Field. Andrea Barrett won the National Book Award for fiction with her story collection Ship Fever, and Hayden Carruth took the prize in poetry for his collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995. Novelist Howard Norman was among those awarded a Lannan prize for 1996. (ALAN CHEUSE)