Questions of Guilt and Complicity

...There is some grisly suspense about the outcome of the digging, heightened by degrees as trucks pull up at a distance and deposit town residents and then soldiers with a machine gun...

...The baker's driving pessimism and the undernourished world of the novel are more than a lecture on love can credibly overcome...

...Other discussions between the two men go i nto considerable detail about the massacre of American Indians at Wounded Knee ("The women and children fall everywhere...

...Randall Jarrell's novel Pictures from an Institution, with its slideshow construction and fastidious ironies, and William Carlos Williams' starkly powerful, narratively truncated short stories have found devoted, if narrow, audiences...

...Its fairy tale-like lack of specificity as to person or place deprives us of one of the conventional satisfactions of reading novels— immersion in a fictionalized world not so different from our own...

...Despite the unsatisfying ending, the book affords plenty of entertainment and raises in new ways old questions of guilt and complicity, good and evil...

...he describes the quick struggle for the town as passing through "like a spring rain shower...

...a brief screenplay on Genghis Khan...

...In addition, the teacher's attempt to offer the power of love as an alternative to self-interest feels tacked on...

...Responding to a discourse on medieval village life, he asks, "Will there be a test after this...

...He follows three poetry collections with Schopenhauer's Telescope, an oddly inviting novel that tells the story of an unnamed baker from an unnamed, embattled country...

...He attempts the war criminal's typical defense: "By doing what they told me to, I kept myself alive...

...There is a hard-bitten humor throughout, evident in the baker's scene-setting descriptions early on: "Two days ago the war came to our town...

...Denied!' I shouted...

...Eventually the baker is cornered into admitting that he willingly contacted the invaders and assisted them, that when the bodies in his oven were done cooking, he "pulverized them into a paste, the bits of them that weren't burned...

...The German philosopher "said that to gain perspective on any problem, we should travel fifty odd years into the future and invert a telescope, look through the wrong end, from that time in the future, at ourselves as we are, and make decisions with the benefit of hindsight...

...He connects the history of bread to war: "Once people could make bread and beer, they stayed in one place...

...The sensual, Conradian novellas of Colombian poet Alvaro Mutis, recently translated into English, provide further compelling reasons to watch for such crossovers...

...I learned to talk to myself and watch the conversation as if I was another person," he says...

...You can set your watch by human conflict...

...The baker, who narrates the story, appears determined to elongate the process and avoid revelation...

...Spread them around the garden...

...He calls more witnesses (whose roles he also takes), including a cat and a blackbird...

...Determined to prevent her from handling his merchandise, he constructs an observation bunker in his shop, builds a glasstopped counter to protect his bread, and balances a chair on top to prevent her from opening the glass...

...Donovan's prose is direct, idiomatic, and sprinkled with the simplest of metaphors...

...Those horrific words are immediately followed by the baker's standard deadpan narration: "Hush in the gallery...

...a documentary on holes...

...Schopenhauer's Telescope is full of such evictions and displacements, both in its protagonist's voice and in its disjunctive narrative strategies...

...Although the teacher was clearly at a loss for words, that didn't deter the prosecutor from jumping to his feet...

...By choosing as narrator the sardonic, cajoling, evasive, disturbed baker, Donovan prevents us from empathizing with his victims, and effectively leaves us as distanced from the appalling events depicted as the baker is from himself...

...The essayistic asides and storytelling tricks provide lively pacing, intellectual interest, and more laughs than any other novel about a war criminal you're likely to come across...

...Belgian Congo abuses ("they cut the right hand off living villagers to prove that a man was dead for each bullet...

...There is a good deal of funny sparring—some of it between the baker and himself ('"Objection!' I shouted...

...contributor, "Times Literary Supplement," "Laurel Review" Poets often bring to fiction a freshness of conception both singular and invigorating...

...If I helped them, acted as a policeman of my own people, did some odd jobs, I would outlive the conflict...

...Schopenhauer's Telescope may not be beach reading, but that should not spell doom any more than it did for the novel's towering forerunners—those sparsely populated, grimly humorous paeans to self-preservation by Donovan's countryman Samuel Beckett...

...The teacher also initiates a Socratic dialogue that opens with the simple question, "Are you finished with that...

...Self-preservation cannot be a crime...

...The baker, it turns out, is mass-murder obsessed, a student of historic slaughters and their architects...

...The accessibility is a virtue, for it illuminates the grim subject matter...

...Gerard Donovan, the latest to take the step, was raised in Ireland and trained in the writing programs of various American universities...

...This teacher oversees him throughout a snowy afternoon, urging him on while flapping his own arms for warmth and smoking cigarettes...

...The breezy tone and the caginess of the narrator prevent the book's payoff from having the gut-wrenching effect a more strictly naturalistic work might...

...My god, that's a war crime!'" The incongruous humor here, of course, is that there is no gallery, and the teacher is the prosecutor...

...But our expectations are unconvincingly upended by the book's one major twist...

...They grew wheat and defended their territory...

...His unspecified war crimes are at first overshadowed by the book's central action: his digging a large hole in the middle of a field guarded at a distance by soldiers, under the direct supervision of a character identified only as "the teacher...

...But he cannot help being drawn in and showing his contrary, cynical nature...

...It matches self-interest to the nearest second...

...This kind of Marx Brothers zaniness is repeated, to better effect, in the mock trial the teacher insists on staging as the baker nears completion of the hole...

...Whether you want to laugh about war criminals is another question...

...meaning the hole), and ultimately results in the two men retelling the history of human cruelty...

...and the widespread carnage visited on the Middle East and Europe by the Khan dynasty ("they killed between one and two million and left them where they fell in the heat...

...The teacher won't accept this...

...We have already learned that the baker, to survive, has aided the invading forces...

...Soon we get a recounting of a lesson the teacher once gave on the bombing of Dresden...

...I was evicted from inside myself and replaced with a deader version of me...

...The border tension turned into a skirmish and then, inevitably, a battle, and of course, a war...

...before the gruesome truth comes out...

...Still seeking a confession, the teacher plays prosecutor and witnesses, allowing the baker to adopt the roles of judge, defendant and defense counsel...

...In moving from poetry to prose, the author has brought a fresh sensibility to what is more a work of ideas than incidents, of argument than character...

...Along with the mock trial, there is radio coverage of the Mongol invasion...

...plus the teacher's lessons on David Hume, John Locke and the title figure, Arthur Schopenhauer...

...He reads Sun Tzu's The Art of War and, in one of the novel's more outlandish passages, recalls applying its lessons to his dealings with one of his customers—"the policeman's wife, a woman with two dirty hands and a pair of eyes that bulged over my food, her brain eating what she didn't buy...

...In its place we are sustained by Donovan's wit and inventiveness, and the barest of plots...

...It is revealed that he constructed a large oven in his backyard, that soldiers were seen carrying large plastic bags there, that people in the town have disappeared...

...The objective seems to be to extract a confession from the baker before the hole is complete and its ghastly purpose realized...