Sensationalism and Sensibility

...The current collection is the work of an astonishingly gifted young writer with a highly original style and an unrivaled eye for detail...

...True enough, as those of us who were introduced to the Yorks and Lancasters by way of Shakespeare can attest...

...Instead, Roman learns the news from General Arturo Espaillat, a Trujillo henchman known aptly as Razor, and caves in, overwhelmed by an inexplicable passivity...

...From that moment on, and in all the minutes and hours that followed, when his fate was decided, and the fate of his family, the conspirators, and, in the long run, the Dominican Republic, General José René Roman always knew with absolute lucidity what he should do...

...The only character immune to the fixity of Trujillo's gaze is Joaquin Balaguer, the puppet president (also poet and belletrist) who quite unexpectedly assumes genuine power after the assassination...

...He enjoys a few happy months accompanying silent films, but when his employer upgrades to "mechanical music," Ivan is back to bookkeeping...

...By the 1930s her stories of Billancourt life (not collected until 1992) were a popular feature in the Russian emigre newspaper Poslednie novosti (The Latest News), just as I. B. Singer's stories in Yiddish delightedreaders of the Jewish Daily Forward in New York...

...He loves to write about rebels and revolutions...

...The novel's factual subject is the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo...

...whose father offered her to Trujillo to buy his way back into the Chief's good graces...

...literature presents us with a side of history that cannot be found in history books...

...In 1990 he ran for the presidency of Peru on a liberal platform, unsuccessfully...

...He was aided by an Army and secret police made up of relatives and like-minded thugs and sadists...

...and it was because of this long-burning fire that he couldn't go on living...

...The first exception is General José René Roman, secretary of the Armed Forces, who had agreed to support the conspirators and assume power upon Trujillo's death, but plans go awry, and at the crucial moment the conspirators cannot find him...

...Besides manipulating public opinion, he declaws the military by threats of exposure, panders to the Catholic Church, placates the CIA, accommodates Trujillo's family, and to ensure his own rule abandons the assassins to their gruesome fate...

...Except for two characters handled with psychological depth, the "deep-seated and disturbing truths" about the assassination are not revealed in a particularly "oblique way...

...The 13-year-old niece delivered to her doorstep seems at first a burden, then becomes Anastasia's salvation in her final illness...

...Trujillo is dead, yet his quasi-mystical power endures: "Like so many officers, so many Dominicans, before Trujillo his valor and sense of honor disappeared, and he was overcome by a paralysis of his reason and his muscles, by servile obedience and reverence...

...It took them three years to reach Paris, where Berberova remained for 25 years...

...Vargas Llosa shifts from fast-paced-thriller mode to give a subtle, finely imagined account of Balaguer deftly balancing volatile factions...

...He has served as president of PEN International, the writers' organization...

...After 3 5 years, Urania Cabrai, a prominent lawyer in New York, returns to her native Dominican Republic, which she left at the age of 14...

...A small group of dissidents killed him in his car on a dark road, but the planners numbered several dozen more, many of them high-ranking military officers, abetted by the CIA, whose earlier tolerance of Trujillo had finally run out...

...For literature does not lie gratuitously...

...As for Urania Cabrai, she remains a prop...

...Balaguer's personal mantra is "never, for any reason, lose your composure...

...Where Vargas Llosa's considerable power comes from direct confrontation of his subject in brash, primary colors, Berberova, by necessity and inclination, uses more subdued, leached-out tones for her clouded, twilit world of exhausted emigres...

...The girl turns out to be Urania, a virginal 14...

...Why did he do exactly the opposite...

...In a 1987 essay, Vargas Llosa wrote: "Literary truth is one thing, historical truth another...

...Now past her prime and sick, she dreads dying alone...

...Its stories show her locating and defining her subject: the shock of the Revolution, the limbo of exile, the desperate measures of people who have lost their bearings and survive by some tragicomic melange of scheming, fantasy and apathy...

...But things do not usually work out so well in Billancourt...

...With her tough-minded, wry sense of history, she surely appreciated the irony...

...with excessive relish, the novel will tell you precisely how...

...All of a sudden," says one of them, "I realized that something had burned inside of him...

...Still, the most poignant tale, "The Billancourt Manuscript," about the death of Vania Lyokhin at the age of 37, does evoke the lost past...

...Due to her height and unusual thinness, as well as her love for all manner of rare poses, she was taken in public and society sometimes...

...This grotesque piece of exploitative banality, intended to illustrate the long reach of evil, is superfluous...

...I have a long road behind me, no one here has such a long road...

...The stories were uneven, some were written in a hurry for money, with low-level results, but at least half of them were very much to the point...

...An Incident With Music" shows a pathetically comic situation, as Ivan Kondurin, once a second-rate but devoted musician, longs to return to his profession...

...So far so good...

...His new novel, The Feast of the Goat (Farrar Straus Giroux, 404 pp., $25.00, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman), opens with the fiction, set in 1996...

...We find out why at the very end, as well as why she hates her aged, infirm father, a disgraced former senator...

...With everything else on his mind, he has to worry about unsightly stains on his crisp uniform...

...He often had asked himself why the mere presence of the Chief—his high-pitched voice and the fixity of his gaze—annihilated him morally...

...He fled Russia after his Army service and scoured Europe to track down the woman who once gave him a thimble for good luck...

...Anastasia Georgievna, in "The Little Stranger," was once a "captivating enigma...

...His means were extreme repression, torture, imprisonment, appropriation of property, bribery, and corruption of every imaginable kind...

...BERBEROVA soon grasped that her natural form was the novella...

...Petersburg, and The Tattered Cloak, whose title story is a masterpiece, she abandoned the device of an intermediate narrator and assumed her own voice, exploring the Billancourt themes in far greater depth...

...They contain little nostalgia or easy sentimentality, for the characters are too scarred, and too busy making ends meet while sustaining their battered egos by outlandish, doomed hopes for new starts or new loves...

...The Billancourt Tales has a fine Introduction by Berberova"s longtime and superb translator, Marian Schwartz, who deserves all credit for bringing the writer's work to our attention...

...with] traces in them of Gogol, Zoshchenko, Dostoyevsky, early Chekhov...

...In Nina Berberova's The Billancourt Tales (New Directions, 192 pp., $24.95, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz), violence and tyranny are central too, but remain offstage...

...The wily Balaguer is a far cry from Trujillo...

...It is easier to deal with the criticisms I receive from all around the world if I am not aware that the excesses they denounce are true...

...for drapery that had fallen off its hook...

...Even more, however, he loves to write about the brutality that incites rebellion...

...But, although it may be full of fabrications...

...The life of Nina Berberova (1901-1993), now recognized as one of the major 20th-century Russian writers, is an exemplary tale of prodigious talent buffeted by history...

...She has been unable to let a man near her since his manual rape of her...

...moreover, they came to light years ago...

...The Italics Are Mine (1969), Berberova says of Billancourt, "On the corner was the hairdresser's where I had my hair cut, and for me there was no tipping: 'We read your stories, we are very grateful to you, you do not scorn our way of life.' " In 1950, her friends scattered or dead after the War, Berberova left for New York with $63 in her pocket and without knowing any English...

...To their surprise, the friends arranging his funeral discover the manuscript of an unfinished novel...

...His novels abound with scenes of mayhem, murder, rape, and mutilation...

...These facts are readily available in histories of the era, and Vargas Llosa follows them closely in able reportorial fashion (he worked as a journalist in Paris in his youth...

...Trujillo, a figure cut from the same cloth as Caligula, is the eponymous goat and has deservedly been called much worse...

...In "Versts and Sleeping Cars," Grisha tells his own tale: "My roads have not been easy roads, my roads have been largely rails...

...He looks the other way when his schemes require violence: "Do not give me any details, I beg you...

...By 1958 she was teaching Russian literature at Yale, and in 1963 was hired by Princeton...

...Its deceits, devices and hyperbole all serve to express those deep-seated and disturbing truths which only come to light in this oblique way...

...They verge on the gratuitously lurid, often placing the reader in the unsought role of voyeur...

...it unfolds on his last day, with numerous flashbacks and wide-ranging narrative excursions...

...Vargas Llosa's steely cynicism serves our understanding of events better than his brutal details...

...The characters fled the Soviet Union in the wake of the Revolution, and after long, circuitous travels and travail, settled in the dingy Parisian suburb of Billancourt during the 1920s and '30s, to piece together hapless, wistful lives in exile...

...In the hours prior to his death, Trujillo, a voracious sexual predator (in Vargas Llosa's world, sex, power and rage are close kin), recalls his most recent prey, a "skinny girl" who witnessed his humiliation in bed...

...His reign of terror lasted slightly more than 30 years, and he prided himself on transforming the country from backward chaos to a state of efficient, functioning modernity...

...His unsparing but compassionate voice brings unity to the book, as do the reappearing characters and the common setting whose landmarks become familiar—the Hotel Caprice, home to an assortment of down-and-outs, or the Renault factory's "three distant smokestacks that hold up our whole Billancourt sky...

...Everything had been smashed, and he felt like smashing the last shard, crushing it, pulverizing it...

...Later, if possible and expedient, he will try to establish a minimally decent government...

...What he wishes to accomplish beyond a vivid and thorough depiction of a vile regime, succeeded by one slightly less vile, is not clear...

...As for "hyperbole," in the case of Trujillo that is hardly necessary...

...A once-shrewd operator impulsively decides to introduce his two children by different women, each unaware of the other's existence...

...Kolka and Liusenka" strikes a more serious note, anticipating Berberova's mature fiction...

...Russian military officers of the White Army, businessmen, writers, and musicians end up as waiters or hairdressers, or workers in the unsavory Renault factory that is the centerpiece of Billancourt's unstable economy...

...On Fiction Sensationalism and Sensibility By Lynne Sharon Schwartz For several decades Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has been outspoken on behalf of free speech and against tyranny, which he knew as a young man in his homeland...

...that he was proceeding to destroy his life and was even taking pleasure in doing so...

...The husband and father unable to keep a job, in "Photogénique" fails even as a movie extra despite his good looks: He cannot distinguish between the film and real life...

...he can't do it the usual way because of prostate cancer, whether real or invented I don't know...

...Why indeed...

...But Vargas Llosa does not begin to do for Trujillo what Shakespeare did for the Richards and Henrys...

...But now it's quiet all around me, like in the sky...

...In her autobiography...

...His most ambitious and esteemed book, Conversations in the Cathedral (1989), offered a grim view of Peruvian life under the eightyear dictatorship of Colonel Manuel Odria, beginning in 1948...

...I've been a part of art all my life, and now circumstances have flung me into history's economic captivity and I've taken ajob in the bookkeeping department...

...The unalloyed cruelty shown here is neither complex nor interesting, and lingering on its details yields easily to sensationalism...

...Besides the embroidery and occasional jobs as an extra in films (she was a striking beauty), Berberova wrote biographies, poetry, criticism, and fiction...

...He keeps finding her and losing her until he loses her for good, out of the disttaught enervation he shares with his compatriots...

...The chapters describing his consummate political shrewdness, slyness and daring beneath a modest guise are the best in the book...

...In the aftermath, all but two of the conspirators were dispatched outright or tortured to death...

...Vargas Llosa appears not to have used many "deceits" in presenting historical truth, though he does invent pages of believable if repetitive dialogue and rumination for the jittery conspirators—brave and noble in varying degrees, motivated by idealism or revulsion or personal revenge...

...Vargas Llosa might have examined that curious paralysis more closely...

...Rather than pity or terror, the monstrous Trujilio as protagonist provokes simple disgust and outrage...

...This is not so good...

...Many of Vargas Llosa's works intertwine or alternate passages of fact and fiction...

...And yet the historical novel is a genre he has used throughout a distinguished career, notably in The War of the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), a work that played with facts in formally innovative ways...

...But the most accurate description of the collection is by Berberova herself, in her autobiography: "'a lyrico-ironical series of stories about Billancourt-Russian indigents, drunks patresfamilias, Renault workers, courtyard singers, déclassé eccentrics...

...former ladies of fashion or housewives eke out a living by sewing plastic eyes on teddy bears or by embroidery, as the author herself did...

...The friend remarks, "Now it was all clear to me: Vania Lyokhin had died of imagination...

...Born and educated in St...

...Lyokhin's novel envisions his return to his childhood home, where he finds his sister ("what a stranger she had become to me, she who had once bathed in the same tub"), her husband and children whom he's never met, and his mother, who "seemed to detach herself from the floor and float toward me...

...Years later her fiction was published in France, then in the United States, and finally, to her gratification, in Mikhail S. Gorbachev's Russia, so in her 80s she became a literary celebrity...

...How come we never guessed the agony his imagination was causing him...

...and human tears that were more like the drop formations on a piece of Edam cheese than the dew on a rose petal...

...He realized full well that nothing good would come of this...

...That friend is Grisha, who narrates each of the stories...

...as it stands, it is pure melodrama...

...People know me in Billancourt...

...In her later books, The Accompanist, The Ladies from St...

...Petersburg, she quickly became part of the literary world, then fled in 1922 with her lover, the poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich...