DISCOVERIES

The Moon

and the Bonfires

Cesare Pavese

Translated from the Italian

by R.W. Flint

New York Review Books:

154 pp., $12.95 paper

In the 1930s, Cesare Pavese was exiled for anti-fascist activities from his home in Italy’s lower Piedmont to Calabria. He was an America buff. He had written his thesis on Walt Whitman and translated American classics for an Italian publisher. In “The Moon and the Bonfires,” his final novel (Pavese died four months after its publication in 1950), Eel, now 40, returns after 20 years in America to his childhood home in Italy. “It wasn’t a country where you could resign yourself, rest your head and say to others: ‘For better or worse, you know me. For better or worse, let me live.’ That was the frightening part. Even among themselves they didn’t know each other,” he thinks of America. Eel’s friend Nuto knows that if you make a bonfire on the edge of a field, you will get a better crop. He knows that if you graft trees on the first days of the new moon, you will get better fruit. These are things that Eel has forgotten during his time in America.

There are many postwar novels that are meditations on the idea of home. From a distant perch, the smells and the feel of home are made sharper, bigger than life. Like an old puzzle piece, a person’s edges crumple and crack so that they don’t fit even when they go back. “The world had changed me,” he thinks, and perhaps not for the better.

Amerika

The Man Who Disappeared

Franz Kafka

Translated from the German

by Michael Hofmann

The New Press: 218 pp., $23.95

“Amerika” was written in 1914 and edited in 1927 by Kafka’s friend, Max Brod. It was translated the next year by Edwin Muir. The author’s original title for the book, “The Man Who Disappeared,” was dropped because Brod thought that this was a book about a place, a mythical place, a faraway paradise for Europeans, who dreamed of it the way Easterners in this country dream of the West.

In Hofmann’s translation, two previously unpublished sections have been restored. His “Amerika” is more a book about a person. Karl Rossmann is exiled to America by his parents, after he is wrongfully accused of seducing a servant. The novel opens as the ship is docking in New York harbor. Like most Kafka characters, Karl is drawn into a whirlpool seemingly without a will of his own. Life propels him up and down fortune’s ladder, perhaps at a more reckless pace because this is, after all, America, so that within a matter of weeks he finds himself homeless, then working as a lift boy in a grand hotel.

“Everything that happened in the little smoke-filled compartment,” thinks Karl, on a train bound for who knows where, “paled into insignificance compared to what was outside.”

The Shaman’s Coat

A Native History of Siberia

Anna Reid

Walker & Co.: 226 pp., $25

“The state of Siberian shamanism,” writes Anna Reid, correspondent for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph in England, “would be an indicator of the extent to which the indigenous peoples had preserved their identities under Russian rule. The tsars tried to replace shamans with priests. The Communists ostracized and imprisoned them, and under Stalin, shot them or threw them out of helicopters, saying if they could fly, now was their chance.” As a result, Reid finds only scant evidence of shamanism in an area that is 1/12 of the world’s land mass, 5 million square miles, where, out of 32 million people, only 1.6 million are indigenous.

But what a journey. Reid tells the story of Siberia, itself a movie peopled with wealthy boyars (the Stroganovs, who came to Siberia for iron and ore), diamond plunderers (not unlike our gold-rush pioneers), Khans (all magically related to Genghis), pirates like Yermak (the Cossack version of Robin Hood). Perhaps Reid only scratches the surface (how could it be otherwise?), but the culture of shamanism lives, resplendent, beneath the gray villages.