The Final Voicemails by Max Ritvo

Manzoor Ahtesham The Tale of the Missing Man Trans. Jason Grunebaum & Ulrike Stark. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2018. 308 pages. In Manzoor Ahtesham’s charming and thoughtful The Tale of the Missing Man, protagonist Zamir Ahmed Khan has a mysterious illness characterized by debilitating ennui. It has become so bad, in fact, that he’s jobless and his wife and children have left him. Zamir’s story weaves in and out of the past and present—in the present things go slowly from bad to worse, while the past is encumbered by the audience’s knowledge of where it leads. Zamir disappoints himself by falling ever shorter of his Muslim ideals by drinking and having affairs, and although he achieves his goal of having short stories published in literary journals, he uses a pseudonym and never musters up the courage to tell anyone he knows about his success. Set in Bhopal before and after the Union Carbide tragedy , the meaninglessness of his particular sadness feels even more acute, the scorn of the doctors, friends, and family he turns to for help more understandable. And yet the book is not sorrowful at all. This is primarily because of the “authorial ” intrusions, where a narrator interjects , framing the novel as not only about the minor tragedy of a misspent life but also the major tragedy of a misspent halfcentury of Indian independence. We stop wondering if perhaps this is a book about mental health and instead think of Zamir as a “missing man”: a not-quite alter ego, a trace of a world not quite realized. These layers dampen the sentimental aspect of the story and heighten the philosophical. As the India around Zamir progresses in a way that leaves no room for reflection, no room for anyone but those able to keep their eyes on the economic prize, we are led to wonder: what, indeed, could have been? The Tale of the Missing Man is quite well known in the original Hindi, and the translation , by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark, captures the geographical and class specificities of tone very well, while also requiring no previous knowledge of Hindi or of Bhopal. It is an everyman’s story that asks of us: how different could we have been if we helped one another find what we were looking for? Rashi Rohatgi Nord University VERSE Max Ritvo The Final Voicemails Minneapolis. Milkweed. 2018. 88 pages. The late Max Ritvo was something of a rising star in American poetry before his death, at only twenty-six, in 2016. This volume , edited by Louise Glück, offers selections from Ritvo’s last poems along with a handful of poems from his Yale undergraduate thesis. The undergraduate poems, which make up the second part of the book, are indeed exceptional as juvenilia, but they are truly of interest for how their efforts at surrealism and their preoccupation with the relationship of body to soul predict the most striking characteristics of the fine later poems that make up part 1. It is striking how much Ritvo matured as a poet in just a few years, but it is also striking how clearly the later poems grew out of the earlier ones. The late poems are primarily on the subject of the poet’s illness, and they creatively and movingly explore the way we are both distinct from and identical with our bodies, a theme that severe illness has a way of emphasizing but which is also a part of everyday human experience. “Today I woke up in my body / and wasn’t that body anymore,” he writes in “Cachexia.” In “Earthquake Country before Final Chemotherapy ,” Ritvo imagines his own skeleton, which he refers to using the third-person pronoun, wandering alone to the Golden Gate Bridge. This tension between body and soul often produces extraordinary imagery, as in “The Soundscape of Life Is Charred by Tiny Bonfires,” in which he writes: “I heard mostly my breath, inside of which // was a small baby suckling / my air for his milk.” As serious as the subject matter is, these poems tend toward the whimsical, a sort of surrealist playfulness in the Ashbery/ O’Hara vein. In “Tuesday

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