The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass

Lawrence Osborne The Forgiven Hogarth Driving to their friends’ exotic get-together in the remote Moroccan Sahara, Dr. David Henniger and his wife unexpectedly invite a dead body as their “plus one.” The couple suffers the immediate consequences of the pre-party crash and its eye-opening repercussions upon their marriage. A nomadic journalist and hardened traveler, Lawrence Osborne details the physically and emotionally draining journey of the discontent London couple. Victoria Nelson Gothicka Harvard University Press Twenty-first-century works such as the Twilight Saga, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Da Vinci Code have converted gothic literature’s three hundred years of extraordinary monsters into humans with ordinary emotions and desires. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson examines the gothic genre’s modification in popular culture. Nelson suggests that the most recent humanizing of the gothic aesthetic illustrates a new dimension of spirituality in America. january–february 2013 • 69 Nota Bene in his native Morocco, where homosexuality is still a crime, punishable by up to three years in jail. As in his previous fictional works—Mon Maroc (2000), Le rouge du tarbouche (2004), and L’armée du salut (2006)—Taïa’s narrator is a sensitive and gifted young man from a poor Moroccan family, fascinated by music and cinema , and seeking to express himself through his writing. Vulnerable and often victimized, he is frequently attracted to stronger men who tend to use him and move on. His short stories and novels are also characterized by constant movement, changes, and travels, reflecting Taïa’s trips to Switzerland and France to study and write, to Egypt to work on a film, and back to Morocco to visit his family. This short novel (141 pages) of self-discovery is divided into four parts: “I Remember,” “I’m Going There,” “Running Away,” and “Writing .” In each part, the narrator, at one stage of his life, is running— figuratively or literally—sometimes away from, sometimes toward something or someone, be it a danger, an aspiration, or a lover. Each part also involves the narrator’s brush with self-destruction or death, followed by something resembling a renewal or resurrection. Taïa’s sentences are generally short, with an oftenbemused , detached tone that nevertheless conveys nostalgic longing for the vanished world of his youth, in spite of its obvious brutality. In the first part of the novel, the very young (not quite thirteen-year-old) narrator , once again named Abdellah, is drawn to an older and tougher teenager , Ali, who turns out to be not just an ordinary bully but a thug who calls in his friends to gang-rape Abdellah. This sordid moment is suspended in grotesquely comic fashion when the would-be rapists are interrupted first by the muezzin’s loud, melodious call to prayer, then by Ali’s mother, who wants him to run an errand: “You have to go to the store. . . . We’re out of donuts and it’s almost snack time.” The three other parts of the novel are less shocking or contrasted, but they follow the initial pattern of the narrator’s swift movement, sudden fall, and resurgence. Compared to Taïa’s previous autobiographical texts, An Arab Melancholia is somewhat more innovative in terms of narrative structure but covers similar thematic terrain. The author broke new ground with Le jour du Roi (2010; see WLT, March 2011, 68). Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Verse Harry Clifton. The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass. Winston-Salem, N.C. Wake Forest University Press. 2012. isbn 9781930630604 This complex, evocative volume takes up the theme of haunting and return so central to Harry Clifton’s work, and does so masterfully. It wastes no time, immediately placing us in a mesmerizing landscape that disorients even as it calls the past to memory. Ancestors stand ready to greet one who returns, who is “ready to try again” by immersing himself in an element both welcoming and uncomfortable. In these poems, history cannot be represented by an orderly museum, or time by an arrow. The fin-de-siècle images of “Little 70 World Literature Today reviews Jerusalem,” the magnificent opening poem, encourage us to contemplate our own moment, which may also be

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