Zsuzsa SelyemIt's Raining in Moscow by Erika Mihálycsa Peter Sherwood

a fabulous job of researching. We see the famous Colombian writer among contemporaries such as Adriano González León, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, and Elena Garro, all working toward a “New Latin American Novel,” a concept the author works hard to establish. The byword and the concept in the middle of this study is the “networked creativity” of Latin American writers, to which end the critic Luis Harss is instructively quoted: “All of these people lived more in the language than in the country.” Whether or not literary history will buy the concept that three generations “collaborated ” in the short form (think Borges), hybridity (think Cortázar), and the New Novel (think Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez) remains to be seen. Within this big picture are many juicy bits. Santana-Acuña discounts the value of passage through Cuba and New York City (Pascale Casanova’s Paris is not even mentioned) and focuses readers on Barranquilla and Mexico City. In the former, Santana-Acuña shows through close readings how García Márquez transformed his style at the sentence level by adopting a mix of devices from journalism and from Faulkner. He was so style-forward by the Mexico City period that some of his colleagues at Mundo Nuevo began to call the author “García Marketing,” since he aggressively demonstrated that “publicity was key to creating a literary brand.” This makes fascinating reading and sustains the claim that a “Latin American” literary Spanish, as well as point of view, was being created. Two things readers should not expect to see in the study are Carmen Balcells’s agentry and the heralded translation skills of Gregory Rabassa. We have probably heard enough about the former, and the astute views of translation scholar Deborah Cohn are visible behind the scenes, influencing a levelheaded view of translatability. Placing García Márquez so carefully among the nuanced forces of Latin American literature , however, makes this an essential book for readers of Cien Años and a rewarding one for anyone interested in the globalization of world literature. William Marling Case Western Reserve University Zsuzsa Selyem It’s Raining in Moscow Trans. Erika Mihálycsa with Peter Sherwood. New York. Contra Mundum Press. 2020. 147 pages. IT’S RAINING IN MOSCOW is the first collection of stories in English by Zsuzsa Selyem, a well-known Transylvanian Hungarian author and critic (see WLT, Nov. 2016 and Autumn 2019). It focuses on the history of one family, the Beczásys, who had Armenian ancestors but put down strong roots in a Transylvanian village; in the center stands István Beczásy, agricultural expert and gentleman farmer (the author’s maternal grandfather), with chapters devoted to Bandy, the easygoing uncle from Budapest, and Zina (Juci), István’s elegant polyglot wife. The stories span over forty years of Communist rule in Romania, starting with a hunt arranged for some “important comrades” in 1947 and ending with a “Circus Finale” of 1989, the year of change. In between, you have humorous and horrifying stories of the vicissitudes and sufferings of the Beczásys, first in forced resettlement, then jail, and also at forced labor on the Danube Canal. Selyem’s narrative technique is skillful, vaguely postmodern, occasionally veering toward the absurd. While we can be involved in the story of Lux, Beczásy’s dog, and try and sympathize with the pathetic cat shivering in the gales at the Danube Canal (the place of István’s interment), it is hard to accept the far-too-intelligent comments of the bedbug in Beczásy’s cell in “Patissserie 1952.” It is one thing to regard prisoners of the secret police simply as “nutriments” but another (from a tiny bedbug’s point of view?) to treat the vile modus operandi of the Securitate in some detail. The experiences of Lux, the clever and faithful dog, recall Tibor Déry’s ”Niki,” a Hungarian novel about a dog, which achieved international fame in the years following 1956. Most of these stories are imbued with humor and understanding for the main character, who is much more interested in the quality of the soil or the propects

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