MNEMOSYNE : Greek Titan goddess of memory ; mythology ; pictures : MNEME. The River of Myths by Hans Rosling. ‘Beggar’s Feast,’ by Randy Boyagoda. The First Man. Policía Federal; Flag; Wenzel Peter’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden Carlos Fuentes’s final novel takes on the sociopolitical problems of modern Mexico.
Adam in Eden is a novel about drug-trafficking that doesn’t talk about drug-traffickers. It is a novel about the Garden of Eden that hardly acknowledges God. It is a political novel free of rants and rhetoric. And it is a funny novel, with a sort of hidden poignancy: it makes you laugh until, upon closing it, you find yourself no longer laughing. Adam in EdenBy Carlos Fuentes Dalkey Archive, 220 pages, $20 It is also the last published novel from the celebrated Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a man who wrote almost exclusively about Mexico but was once called into question for lacking a true Mexican identity. The jokiness and nonchalance of tone can be a little irritating until the reader relaxes into Fuentes’s “ironic disposition.”
Subscribe to TNI magazine for $2 and get Volume 12: Weather Adam in Eden is no polemic. E. David Ferry's Beautiful Thefts. Poetry is innately related to theft.
The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe—the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.
David Ferry, who, at the age of eighty-eight, has just won the National Book Award for poetry, is a special kind of thief. He carries us to places we can’t possibly visit, from the Mesopotamia of Gilgamesh to Horace and Virgil’s Rome. Because the muses favor me and love me, As far as I’m concerned let the wild winds carry All sadness and trepidation far away. ‘The Tale of the Heike,’ Translated by Royall Tyler. Illustration by Tomer Hanuka The central conflict in “The Tale of the Heike” (pronounced, approximately, hay-keh) is between two warring clans, the Heike and the Genji, each pledged to protect the emperor in the capital city of Kyoto.
The ascendancy of the tyrannical Heike leader Taira no Kiyomori, obnoxious as Agamemnon, sets in motion events that lead to his own downfall and, inevitably, that of his family and followers. Kiyomori, “who never honored any wish but his own,” rules through terror, employing a squad of red-shirted ruffians to inform him of any threats to his power. He is also a tyrant in love, dismissing the beautiful dancer Gio, who has been his favored consort, when the younger Hotoke catches his predatory eye. In a risky show of solidarity, both women shave their heads and retire to a convent. ‘Memorial,’ Alice Oswald’s Version of the ‘Iliad’ Illustration by Yuko Shimizu In “Memorial,” the British poet Alice Oswald has had the provocative idea of boiling down the poem to two of its most striking features: the gruesome fatalities and the similes that often lie in pastoral counterpoint to the action.
Western values. From ‘Jesse James’ to ‘Django Unchained’, a look at how the movies that shaped America lost their myth-making power ©Raymond Depardon/Magnum Photos Rod Taylor filming a western in 1972 On my fifth birthday, which I celebrated in Washington, DC, where I spent part of my childhood, I received a cowboy outfit, which gave me so much pleasure that I can still remember its every fashion detail.
There was a tasselled tan waistcoat, a shining sheriff’s star, a brown and white holster and a golden, long-barrelled gun. There was also an extravagant, wide-brimmed hat, half a pint passing for ten gallons, which I refused to take off for the entire day. Younger readers may be surprised to know that I also received a second world war flak jacket, a scaled-down section of the Pacific fleet with detachable torpedoes, and a handful of grenades.