Machine Dreams
Phillips, Robert
boxed edition and elaborate promotion trumpeted a victory almost before the gauntlet was flung. Predictably, success followed. Now the conqtiering display of his beaming face and copies of the book...
...I Others were brief, stark heart-stabs --grotesque tales in the manner of Erskine Caldwell or Flannery O'Connor...
...But the tech- nique has gone slack, partly because the expansive quality and divided stories in- herent in the subject do not require Var- gas Llosa'.s analytic expansion and exploitation, mostly because Vargas J Llosa does not edit the sequences so much as merely shuffle them...
...For once you may be better off waiting for the picture...
...Nevertheless, this War, while offering some exciting skir- mishes, is more shadow-boxing than bat- tie, better suited to subway riders need- ing a long but interruptible read than to admiring fans who still see Vargas Llosa as a laureate lacking only a Nobel crown...
...Now the conqtiering display of his beaming face and copies of the book in New York stores as well as a radiant front-page review in the Times seem to celebrate that victory...
...The "machine dreams" of the title ostensibly are nightmares which Mitch Hampson has after serving in the second world war...
...He dreams of bulldozing de- caying corpses of the enemy, which he in fact had to do...
...This journalist, nearsight- ed by Homeric epithet on every appear- ance, breaks his glasses and cannot see anything during the destruction of the religious community...
...Worse still, Var- gas Llosa withdraws the shadowy Coun- selor into his citadel rather early on, so we see less of, hear almost nothing di- rectly from him...
...More significant is the void at the cen- ter...
...Vargas Llosa's subject does be- come ours, especially in the spirited translation of Helen Lane, whose lively diction and syntactical revision focus the original for us...
...Imagine the Gospels, hyperbolically expanded but with chiefly indirect reports of Jesus, gathered from a sociological cross-section of puzzled Romans, repentant sinners, and ignorant converts, and you'll get something of the II II Recurring battle scars picture...
...Black Tickets was a mixed bag...
...Half the stories were linear family chronicles, like "Home" --which began with the mar- velous first sentence, " 'I'm afraid Wal- ter Cronkite has had it,' says Morn...
...Fortunately she chose the former, and Machine Dreams is whole-cloth --an accomplished novel which is ambitious and original...
...Few sparks glint when he slams one chunk of the big story into another...
...personal history, or the more flashy Southern Gothic...
...Perhaps the grand subject came too ready-made: the true story of the Coun- selor, a backiand religious leader, who, at the turn of the century in Brazil, estab- lished an errant Christian community that challenged the emerging secular republic as the antichrist and nearly succeeded in toppling not only the civil government but also a military establishment unac- customed to fighting unprofessional wars...
...The jacket was larded with nine blurbs (Raymond Carver, Tillie Olsen, Rosellen Brown, et...
...No one aware of the entanglement of church, government, and army in South America can read these pages only as novel, as historical freak...
...When it was announced that Ms...
...Vargas Llosa ob- viously intends our necessarily myopic view of historic events, but this man's redundant whining and blinking dwindle to a Dickensian mechanism never properly wound up, losing our interest before earning any...
...The War's profound, curious pertinence, which may have overwhelmed the author, will reward you...
...Phil- lips had delivered a novel, one wondered which direction it would take -- familial II Ill ll~glllll[ Illlrdl~ Jayne Anne Dutton...
...Some of these pieces were as brief as a single paragraph...
...and re- viewers outdid themselves in marking this debut by a young writer...
...IRoi~rt lPhlmln T SAY Jayne Anne Phillips's first o book, the story collection Black Tickets, was highly praised would be un- derstatement...
...This is a Latin American apocalypse now, and you will shudder in recognition (before sighing with tedium...
...Such a conflict of absolutely cer- tain beliefs almost demanded the au-thor's well-known technique: social analysis through clashing views -- of the leader and his followers from inside the settlement, from outside by soldiers, politicians, and priests, and from mid- point by natives being won over to the communistic community...
...But machines play impor- tant roles throughout the novel --new and used automobiles, old dump trucks, 19 October 1984:567...
...but the author cannot get him to say much more than things like "Death is a fiesta for the just man," which sums up his quirky emphasis on proper burial but sounds more like a sophomore's reading of Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude...
...Two principal characters, among the proverbial cast of thousands, contribute to the book's massive hollowness: a journalist who serves as one of Vargas Llosa's surrogate authors, and the Coun- selor himself...
...We hear about the Counselor, about his ability to convert children, legendary criminals, and pathetic misfits into Chris- tian paradigms (with names like The Lit- fie Blessed One...
...Like the author's insistent little litanies of enumeration and descriptive detail throughout the text, the journalist means more to the author than he ever can to us...
...pro-tagonists included a fifteen-year-old-child-molester, an incestuous brother and sister, and a woman who has or-gasms only when she makes love to her- self...
...16.95, 327 pp...
...The book was praiseworthy, though not the kind of fwst book which demon- strates a fully developed talent or a unique vision (the way, say, Eudora Wel- ty's first collection, A Curtain of Green, could have been written by no one else...
...Yet, despite an elephantine slackness, The War of the End of the World brands our imagination, first with its many small scenes of physical violence -- including a rape we should hope to forget --and, second, with its vision of this anomalous war as the beginning of South America's twentieth-century world, the world we watch, through the clouded lenses of our media, being fought over these days...
...But never before has Vargas Llosa said less with so much more...
Vol. 111 • October 1984 • No. 18
