DISCOVERIES

REFLECTIONS AND SHADOWS

By Saul Steinberg

Translated from the Italian

by John Shepley

Random House: 128 pp., $24.95

“I managed to get out of a number of cul-de-sacs,” Saul Steinberg, one of America’s most beloved artists and cartoonists, says, by which he means “the vulgarities of humorous drawings and the banalities of commercial art.” This memoir is the product of many conversations with and recorded by his friend Aldo Buzzi in the 1970s.

Steinberg was born in Romania in 1914. In 1933 he immigrated to Italy, ostensibly to study architecture, but “my chief interest just then was in girls.” He was arrested for being Jewish in 1940, was detained for a year and came to America in 1941. Steinberg had no professional artistic training; this volume, with its brief memories, adds much to our understanding of his inspirations and motivations: family photographs, the primitive and avante-garde cultures of Romania in his youth; and a strange collection of uncles: a sign painter, a stationer, a watchmaker and a croupier.

Steinberg, who died in 1999, is cheerful about everything, even his arrest; his contempt is reserved for American children and American food. He speaks briefly about his own work, particularly his “Reflections,” whimsical drawings of daily life upside-down and right-side up. “These reflections enchant me,” he writes, “by the strangeness of their existence (strangeness is a quality of miracles).” This parenthetical phrase illuminates what is so appealing about Steinberg’s drawings: their very strangeness.

*

PERMA RED

By Debra Magpie Earling

Blue Hen: 288 pp., $24.95

A new writer comes straight at us out of the West, bypassing the conscious mind in describing her world of Indian reservations, so that we almost smell that world before we understand it. Like Eskimos and snow, Debra Magpie Earling has a hundred different ways of describing clouds: “clouds faded overhead like wide ghosts,” “clouds bleaching to wind, a haze of dust changing light like silt changes water,” “clouds lit the high moon.” Her writing is the most physical I have read in a long time: a “blister-blue truck,” a “dull-fisted warmth in her throat,” “dark silky wood,” “wind spinning close to the ground, gruff-voiced and angry.” There are countless smells, sounds, even feelings that are unfamiliar to many readers: the smell of smoke and chokecherries, for example, or the “scorched wind puls[ing] at the door,” “dizzy beads of blood spun black in her vision,” “the thought made her breathless as clouds.” Verbs and adjectives dance in new configurations. All this and plot too.

“Perma Red” is the story of a young, redheaded Indian girl, Louise, who is pursued through her teens and young adulthood by three men: Baptiste, violent and often drunk, “with his love so hateful it made her wish for peace”; Charlie Kicking Woman, the tribal officer who risks his marriage and his job to save her from Baptiste; and Harvey Stoner, a rich, cruel cowboy. Louise will not be confined and keeps running, first from truant officers, then from these men. Finally, she marries Baptiste, fierce and dark, “the last of the old ones,” to escape the truant officers. After four days she runs away. Earling, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, captures Louise’s wildness and in so doing explains a great deal about how life once was for the Indians in Montana.

*

SHADOW MOUNTAIN

A Memoir of Wolves,

a Woman, and the Wild

By Renee Askins

Doubleday: 336 pp., $24.95

In 1986, Renee Askins founded the Wolf Fund, the organization that helped reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone National Park. “Shadow Mountain” is the story of how she came to love and admire wolves, but it is also an attempt to inspire readers to form relationships with animals. “The other,” she often calls them, describing the recognition of sameness and difference, the sense of companionship, not “ascendancy,” that she feels with them.

Through high school and college, she took several internships to study owls, wolves and deer. Raising a wolf pup named Natasha, Askins formed an attachment that was broken when her mentor sent Natasha to another compound, where she died in captivity. This break fueled Askins’ ferocity and her skepticism toward academics and bureaucrats.

Askins writes about the importance of wildness inside of us as well as wilderness in our world. She raises the question: Why do we destroy everything organic in our environment? She insists on the importance of animals and nature to children. “I believe,” she writes, “that places make us who we are, that landscape carves out a certain character and community, and that ultimately the places in which we choose to live govern the unfolding of our lives.”