The Mountains of Parnassus by Stanley Bill

George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American narrative, a contributing editor at World Literature Today, and lecturer in Spanish at the University of Oklahoma. unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant.” Pitol’s characterization seems tailor -made for our unnamed, disembodied narrator with one exception: her memories are almost always unpleasant, anxious, even terrifying. “My memories make me fearful and undermine my serenity of memory,” she tells us. Indeed, the same dis-ease of memory that plagues the narrator-protagonist pervades the entire novel and, in doing so, interrupts the story’s temporality. In short, the story does not always progress linearly; instead, it necessarily moves to and fro, in a quasi stream of consciousness that both reflects and represents the fragmentary nature of memory. In his excellent introduction, Phillip Lopate alludes to the autobiographical aspect of the text, specifically the death of the narrator’s mother in 1954, the same year that Boullosa’s own mother died. This point, however, seems inconsequential. What’s more, in an interview with Vanessa Vilches Norat in 1999, Boullosa emphatically stated, “Mis textos no son autobiográficos ” (My texts are not autobiographical). The mother in Before does, however, play a central role, as does the spectral father Pedro Páramo in Rulfo’s eponymous novel. Just as Juan Preciado is haunted by the memory of a father he never knew, the nameless narrator-protagonist in Before is haunted by the memory of a mother she calls only Esther. Peter Bush’s adroit translation, peppered with Briticisms, may ring a bit foreign to American readers. This foreignness, however , helps distance the text from a contemporary idiom and, in doing so, creates a temporal distance that brings us closer to the period represented in the story. Deep Vellum has published two other works by Boullosa: Texas: The Great Theft and Heavens on Earth, an excerpt of which is featured in WLT’s all-women’s issue (Nov. 2016). Let us hope that Deep Vellum graces us with yet another Boullosa gem. George Henson University of Oklahoma Fiction Czesław Miłosz. The Mountains of Parnassus. Trans. Stanley Bill. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2017. 184 pages. Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate who died in 2004, published two novels in his lifetime. The first, The Seizure of Power, was written in 1952 and came out, in French, in 1953. It covers the years from the end of World War II until 1948, when Communism was forcefully installed in Poland. Driven by feverish shifts in plot, as befitting the dicey times it depicted, it remains of interest as a political commentary written for Western audiences keen on learning how the Other Europe came to be. Miłosz’s second novel, on the other hand, The Issa Valley (1955), is a bildungsroman When I took on the mantle as World Literature Today’s book review editor in the summer of 2015, I did so well aware of the ninety-year publishing legacy that was now my partial responsibility to shepherd. I have spent the last year and a half editing the book review section as I found it in order to understand the logics that put certain conventions in place and the received traditions underpinning them. Beginning with this issue, I’ve decided to tweak those conventions in order to make the review section more dynamic, approachable, and enjoyable for our ever-expanding readership . The most visible change is that the reviews are no longer in alphabetical order by author. The section now opens with a featured review that we felt merited special consideration, generally contributed by a longtime WLT reviewer. We have also moved books that are being released within a month of the current issue to the front of the section, emphasizing the Today in our title. Beyond that, the review section will be curated—not unlike a mixtape or, in the modern vernacular, a playlist —to give the reader a sense of narrative continuity from beginning to end with minisections of thematically or geographically related material, including books not in translation. What has not changed is our commitment to publishing well-written reviews from qualified contributors

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