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unflinchingly individualistic conception of art. Yet it is probably what results from the third of these reasons – the author’s unique style, which defies classification – that gives Sokolov his enduring appeal, as the arrival of this new translation by Alexander Boguslaw- ski attests. Written in a haunting, lyric, stream- of-consciousness mode, A School for Fools delves into the memories of its two narrators (a student at the titular “special school”, and his double, the incarnation of his split personal- ity), in a quest to probe the nature of personal and artistic freedom, and the transcendent Mountaineering power of language. By turns philosophical, prophetic, tragic Felice Benuzzi and allegorical, Sokolov’s polyphonic novel NO PICNIC ON MOUNT KENYA was so antithetical to the Soviet doctrine of 320pp. MacLehose Press. £14.99. Socialist Realism that it was initially imposs- 978 0 85705 376 3 ible to publish. First circulated in samizdat in the USSR, Sokolov took the novel with him he story of an ascent in 1943 of Mount when he emigrated in 1975, and published it TKenya by three escaped Italian prisoners with Ardis in an English translation by Carl was first published in Italian in 1948 and in Proffer a year later. As Boguslawski points out English four years later. A minor classic of in his introduction to this new edition, the twentieth-century mountaineering literature, it quick turn-around meant that Proffer’s has been reissued by the MacLehose Press in “worthy and readable” translation “was pro- this handsomely illustrated edition, with Felice duced rapidly and contained some serious mis- Benuzzi’s own beautifully executed sketches interpretations and mistakes”. To say that supplemented by photos of Mount Kenya and Sokolov’s new translator has merely corrected diagrams of the party’s route to the summit. these, however, would be a vast understate- Benuzzi, captured in 1941 while working ment. Boguslawski’s assiduous devotion to for the Italian diplomatic service in Abyssinia, the text has meant that not only are Sokolov’s opens with an impressionistic account of the many rhythmic and rhymed passages beauti- lassitude and depression of life in his Kenyan fully restored, but also many of the subtler prison camp. Glimpsing Africa’s second- intertexual allusions missed by Proffer are highest mountain (5,199 metres) through a revealed to the English reader for the first time. break in the clouds, he and his two companions This handsome new edition is marred only came up with the outrageous notion of escap- by the occasional heavy-handed editorial note ing to climb the “massive blue-black tooth of tory” to Benuzzi and his companions. “For to confirm the epithet. Both Andresen, with and a few minor Russianisms that have crept sheer rock, inlaid with azure glaciers”. After us”, he writes, “it had just been created.” her light and luminous touch, where each word into the text – “comrades” instead of “class- forging makeshift ice axes from stolen ham- A LAN M CN EE is carefully placed in a poem, and Helder, with mates” (tovarishchi), “how many years we’ve mers, crampons from the running boards and his torrential alchemic verses teeming with been sitting in the special school” instead of mudguards of a scrapped car, and horribly Portuguese Poetry images, seem to be Pessoa’s heirs. “how many years we’ve spent” (prosideli). inadequate sisal ropes from the material used Anthologies have their limitations, a point Such minor points, however, cannot detract to fasten nets to bunk beds, they managed to Richard Zenith, editor Zenith knows well. His exclusions are readily from the overall power of the translation. slip out of the camp, only to endure consider- 28 PORTUGUESE POETS justified either by the fact that a given figure One can only hope to see more of Sokolov in able hardship and danger even before their real A bilingual edition hasn’t been translated satisfyingly enough (the Boguslawski’s stylish translation. mountaineering challenge began. On the face Translated by Richard Zenith and case for Vitorino Nemésio), or by his own per- B RYAN K ARETNYK of it, their mission to climb a technically Alexis Levitin sonal taste. We can naturally grant him that, demanding summit at an altitude higher than 320pp. Dedalus. Paperback, £12.50 (€14.99). especially as 28 Portuguese Poets isn’t just Technology Mont Blanc appears impossible, if not down- 978 1 9102510 0 3 well conceived, but also at times surprising in right suicidal, being made on inadequate the best of ways – for example, by the inclusion Paul Levinson rations by escapees whose bodies were already ichard Zenith, the editor and co-translator of Florbela Espanca, Ardília Lopes and Daniel MCLUHAN IN AN AGE OF suffering from the privations of POW life. Yet Rwith Alexis Levitin of 28 Portuguese Faria. Inevitably, some will disagree about SOCIAL MEDIA after eight months of secret preparation and Poets, is well equipped for his task, having a number of choices in particular. The trans- 16pp. Connected Editions (Kindle Edition). two weeks of trekking and climbing, they suc- already translated most of the figures repre- lations, on the other hand, largely work well £1.99. ceeded in reaching the 4,985 metres peak of sented in this anthology. He is especially in English, even though they are sometimes Lenana – not the mountain’s highest point, but knowledgeable about Fernando Pessoa. Not- uneven. What we can all agree on and salute is ocial media – one of the defining phenom- an extraordinary achievement under the cir- ing the variety of Pessoa’s many faces, Zenith the attentive work of Zenith, introducing to a Sena of our digital age – transmogrifies cumstances. Exhausted and desperately short has boldly and rightly chosen to separate the wider English-reading audience a golden continually, challenging anyone seeking to of food after returning from the summit, they three main heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro, century of poetry in Portuguese. understand how our use of it shapes our world. trekked back to the camp and actually man- Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos – adopted R ICARDO M ARQUES As the media academic Paul Levinson puts it, aged to slip inside before being detected. by Pessoa himself, making these the first Facebook and the ever-growing list of rivals, Benuzzi, who died in 1988 after a long names in the volume. Russian Fiction along with the smart devices that constantly career in the diplomatic service, has a light, Pessoa, “a hard act to follow”, in Zenith’s connect us to them, are “evolving so rapidly as engaging prose style that blends a compelling words, seems to shadow most of the featured Sasha Sokolov to make any printed essay . . . about them likely narrative and moments of comedy with a keen poets, even though the selection reflects the A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS obsolete the day it was published”. In this eye for Kenya’s flora, fauna and landscape, a many directions in which Portuguese poetry Translated by Alexander Boguslawski arresting, if occasionally truncated, essay prisoner’s sensuous appreciation of food and has evolved since Pessoa’s death in 1935. A 288pp. NYRB. Paperback, £8.99 (US $14.95). Levinson sidesteps the problem by applying drink, and a sense of awe and wonder that prime illustration of this flowering is Sophia 978 1 59017 846 1 “poetic, controversial” concepts forged by the evidently stayed with him years after the de Mello Breyner Andresen, as well as many cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan in the ascent. The escapade, he writes, was “a reac- poets of her generation present here, including n enchanting, tragic, and touching last century to our online lives. Although tion against the sluggish life in a POW camp, Eugénio de Andrade, Jorge de Sena and Mário Abook” – such was Vladimir Nabokov’s McLuhan died in 1980 just before the personal an act of will amidst all that inertia”. His Cesariny. A different kind of idiom was devel- opinion of Sasha Sokolov’s debut novel A computer revolution, his ideas “have even concluding chapter outlines the story of previ- oped by Herberto Helder, the “most influential School for Fools. It isn’t difficult to see why greater applicability to the media of today, ous ascents of Mount Kenya – a history almost Portuguese poet after Pessoa”, according to Nabokov’s appraisal was so uncharacteristi- which turns all of us into producers . . . ”. unknown to the party when they hatched their Zenith. The attention paid to Helder’s work in cally favourable: the entomological details, Exemplifying this point, Levinson has pub- plans. The mountain was thus “virgin terri- the poetry world after his death last year seems the fascination with time’s fabric, the lished this essay himself via Amazon, as a new

TLS MARCH 4 2016 IN BRIEF 35 chapter in his 1999 book Digital McLuhan, Ethel Carnie (1886–1962). (Wilson has pro- school, the example of which is still cited Emer O’Toole interviews the activist and which used McLuhan’s theories such as the duced an edition of Carnie’s 1925 novel, This today. Pyke also dispatched correspondents theatre director Grace Dyas about her trilogy global village to illuminate the emerging inter- Slavery; I provided the introduction to the into Nazi Germany – and, though a British Jew of productions on the history of heroin in Ire- net. Here he focuses on recent developments; centenary edition of Carnie’s first novel, the – entered the belly of the beast himself dis- land. So too Michele Horrigan, an artist and for example, the selfie. By using McLuhan’s aptly titled Miss Nobody, also edited by Wil- guised as the leader of an English golf team to curator from rural Limerick, discusses intui- tetrad – four questions that form “a way of son.) Writing for the Woman Worker in 1909, conduct Gallup-style polls designed to deter- tive crafting with a local walking-stick maker. mapping the . . . interconnections of technolo- Carnie sets a high bar when it comes to con- mine Hitler’s actual support. In an interesting transcript of a conversation gies across time” – Levinson situates smart- veying the sacred space of home, and in chal- By far Pyke’s most surprising career turn, between an Irish stand-up comedian Tommy phone self-portraiture in a provocative lenging sentimental notions of home as place however, was with Louis Mountbatten’s Com- Tiernan and Winter Pages’s co-editor Kevin historical context. These images amplify “the of tranquility: bined Operations, where he proposed the Barry, Barry brings up the subject of Protestant merging of photographer and subject”, obso- You aristocrats . . . will never know the delight development of what became skidoos and con- and Catholic types of Irish output, and if this lesce “the world as our tableau”, and retrieve with which the toiler looks around his home on ceived of the project code named Habbakuk links to a town–country divide (Tiernan sug- “looking at our own reflection in the pool of Sunday afternoon . . . . You take all the shine and (sic). Though rendered unnecessary by the gests that Dublin writers have a “precise and water”. For Levinson the “entrée to the future” cleanliness for granted – servants have done it – launch of the Bogue-Class escort carriers, at forensic” style). The range of material in this is the tetrad’s last question – “what does the and the labour of others has made you rich the height of the Battle of the Atlantic this plan anthology, however, counters whether such new medium, when pushed to its limits . . . flip enough to obtain this lovely thing and that – but to create an unsinkable iceberg-cum-aircraft distinctions are relevant or helpful. into?” The flip of the photograph, the selfie we know the price of our belongings, and carrier made from what was called Pykrete, A DRIAN D UNCAN in turn flips in to “Snapchat, which invites dis- scarcely get time to behold them. seized Winston Churchill’s mind and for a semination of images . . . that disappear” Carnie’s language is of its time, of course, but time occupied military planners in the United Cultural Studies within seconds. the anger is timeless – her voice provides Wil- States and test sites in the Canadian Rockies. The flip that excites Levinson most is the son’s book with a roar of frustration that could N ATHAN M . G REENFIELD William Scott Wilson book into ebook, which has “spearheaded a never come from outside observers, whose WALKING THE KISO ROAD profound revolution in the gatekeeping of voyeuristic portrayals of working-class homes Anthologies A modern-day exploration of old Japan media” that McLuhan anticipated in 1977: can be so unsatisfactory. Home in British 288pp. Shambhala. Paperback, £12.99. “the Xerox makes everyone a publisher”. Lev- Working-Class Fiction will no doubt find Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith, editors 978 1 61180 125 5 inson argues persuasively that the digital age itself at home in the humanities libraries of WINTER PAGES should rehabilitate McLuhan, whose ideas many universities, but if only – given its focus 192pp. Curlew Editions. €40. apan is not all the neon flash and frantic buzz some have dismissed as anachronistic. Social on “The Uprooted and the Anxious” and 978 0 9933029 0 9 Jof Tokyo or Osaka; it is also tea and sweets media echoes McLuhan’s own “attempt to “Estates and the New Slum Life”, as two of its at Mrs Yamaki’s house and walking back break through the regimented strictures of chapter titles put it – a few policy-makers and inter Pages, a new yearly anthology on through rice paddies perhaps to find a wild traditional print media”. In The Gutenberg politicians could chance across it, too. Wthe Irish arts, contains an array of short boar in your front room. Yet this Japan is a Galaxy (1962), McLuhan replaced chapter B ELINDA W EBB fiction, non-fiction and photography from a country that most visitors fail to reach, one that titles with glosses reminiscent of Twitter’s number of practitioners in literature, theatre, seems all but mythical after those rose-tinted 140-character communications, showing that Biography film and the visual arts. Mark O’Connell’s Studio Ghibli films and the suburban sprawl his “modes of expression were not odd . . . but essay follows the trials of faith facing a young which makes it feel impossible that one could fundamentally human”. Promising to update Henry Hemming Dublin priest, while the film and television go more than ten steps without running into a his essay online as new patterns of media usage THE INGENIOUS MR. PYKE writer John Butler contributes a lively piece vending machine. emerge, Levinson’s work is as interesting for Inventor, fugitive, spy describing the frantic lunacy of “pilot season” William Scott Wilson’s Japan is that rarity: how it is published as for what it says. 512pp. Public Affairs. $26.99. in Los Angeles, and Jon McGregor, during a Japan as it is, an unpretentious mixture of T RISTAN Q UINN 978 1 61039 577 9 cycle trip around the west of Ireland, reflects ancient and modern, picturesque and pathetic. affectingly on a failed relationship. Claire This is true of Wilson’s writing as well. Walking Literary Criticism eoffrey Pyke’s variegated career included Kilroy’s “F for Phone” is a moving look back the Kiso Road is a chronicle of his most recent Gsneaking as a war correspondent into on her experience of pregnancy, motherhood and final trip down the Kiso Road, a famed thor- Nicola Wilson Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany during the First and the effect these have had on her life as a oughfare which has been in use and popular HOME IN BRITISH WORKING-CLASS World War on an American passport, then writer – balancing the regret of lost profes- with travellers since the eighth century, but FICTION being the first POW to escape the Reich – as sional time with feelings of gratitude and which became a vital route for lords and samu- 252pp. Ashgate. £60. well as becoming a pioneer in children’s edu- hope. The publication ends with an unsettling rai to the new capital of Edo (now Tokyo) in 978 1 4094 3241 8 cation, a wildly successful commodities inves- poem, “Corncrake and Curlew”, from Paul the seventeenth century. Wilson is a respected tor, a sociologist of Nazi Germany, supporter Muldoon (“The corncrake marvels at the land translator of samurai texts, and his erudition is ome in British Working-Class Fiction of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War being green / although the hay’s been saved. / what really elevates Walking the Kiso Road. Hturns away from a “masculinist, work- and a military inventor. Despite all the efforts The curlew knows the land’s so green / Alongside memories of earlier journeys, com- based understanding of class in favour of of British secret services spent tailing him, the because it’s a mass grave”). plaints about the state of his feet, and details home, gender, domestic labour and the family one thing he wasn’t, was a German – or was it Elsewhere, there are well-crafted and com- about his lodgings and dinners, he provides his kitchen”. Nicola Wilson’s first full-length Soviet – spy. pelling short stories, for example, “Plunkett own translations of travel guides and diaries book is an ambitious and welcome addition to Aphorisms such as “The correct formula- Mundy woke up on a table in Pigalle” by John about the same journey from centuries ago, and the few studies about the working class by the tion of a problem is more than half-way to its Kelly is a tale of obsession with a person that he includes choice poems about the landscape, working class, which changes it from subject solution” or “Everything is irrelevant till cor- neither the reader (nor the narrator, Plunkett the towns and the experience of travelling to experience. Wilson draws on an impressive related with something else”, might sound Mundy) ever sees or meets. Desmond Hogan’s through the Kiso Valley written by some of range of sources to argue that there has been a vague, but as Henry Hemming shows in this “The Metlar” is a loosely affiliative series of Japan’s most celebrated poets. tendency to ignore the importance of ideas and fascinating book about what may be the last of memories and happenings connected to the Wilson builds an image of quiet continuity meanings of home as a key part of working- the long line of brilliant British amateurs, they “Metal Bridge” that crosses the River Shannon throughout the ages and a strong argument class writing. In this she has been strongly explain Pyke’s method of thinking that as it flows out of Limerick city. Hogan’s prose for slow, considered travel. “Like Edo-period supported by Carolyn Steedman, Valerie allowed him to break down what management oscillates between what is real and unreal: warlords, we ride along in modern-day palan- Walkerdine and Joanna Bourke. gurus today call “silos”. Take Pyke’s and “Traveller boy who lives in a Winnebago . . . quins, emerging at our destinations and miss- Wilson defines “working-class” broadly so Teddy Falk’s flight from Germany; reasoning swims naked at the Metal Bridge, blessing ing everything in between”, he writes in the as to include D. H. Lawrence, Ellen Wilkinson that the Germans would expect them to head himself before swimming, slight, workhouse afterword. “But when we bypass the tiny tea- and Robert Tressell, as well as contemporary straight for the Dutch border after escaping buttocks, pubes a fugitive chestnut, that of a house selling rice cakes grilled with sweet writers such as Janice Galloway, Livi Michael from Ruhleben POW Camp, they headed squirrel running up a tree”. miso sauce, we cheat ourselves of the taste of and James Kellaway. Pat Barker’s first trilogy deeper into Germany and, to further their dis- This anthology pays attention to emerging, three centuries of travel in the Kiso.” Wilson’s (Union Street, Blow Your House Down and guises as outdoorsmen, went to Berlin’s Wer- as well as established, writers from Ireland, descriptions and quotations are so evocative Liza’s England) provides her with a richly theim’s department store to purchase camping alongside creatives in other disciplines. In one and his tone so companionable that the reader detailed view of home and a sense of self and equipment. Or consider Pyke’s arbitrage of the interviews that appear throughout the feels transported to the calm of a grove, dis- place as inextricably linked. There are also a system (which focused not on the ups and publication, Lenny Abrahamson, the director cussing local folklore and where to have our few exceptions: Elizabeth Gaskell and Nell downs of the price of tin but on the deviation of the Oscar-nominated Room (2015), tells us next meal. There are no blinking neon signs Dunne, the author of Poor Cow. It is also good between the two extremes). Pyke devised it in about his process: from writing to casting and or salacious stories in this book, only the quiet to see her acknowledge the achievements of the mid-1920s, allowing him to all but corner shooting, and how difficult it is to retain an pleasures of friendship, shared experiences working-class women writers who have too the market in tin and provide funds for the open-ended sense of creativity within this lin- and journeys for the sake of journeying. conveniently fallen into obscurity, such as Malting House, a liberal early-childhood ear progression of filmmaking. The journalist M ORGAN G ILES

TLS MARCH 4 2016