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The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood by Elias Canetti. New York. 1979. Seabury Press. hardcover. 268 pages. Jacket design by Tim McKeen. Translated From German by Joachim Neugroschel. 0816491038.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   This autobiography provides a searching portrait of the personal background and the creative development of the novelist, philosopher, and social critic Elias Canetti. Although Canetti is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, little has been known heretofore about the man whose prophetic study of fascism AUTO-DA-FE won the Prix International for fiction and whose work CROWDS AND POWER remains a classic in the field of social psychology. But now THE TONGUE SET FREE presents the compelling story of his early life, the events, personalities, and intellectual forces which shaped the growth of this artist as a young man. The shifting environments described range from Bulgaria to Manchester, England, from Switzerland to Vienna. The primary themes concern the effect of a multilingual home, the psychological impact of a patriarchal Jewish family, and the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of World War I and its aftermath. The volume’s five major chapters are self-contained to reflect the changes in social milieu that drove Canetti to equate the quest for his own language – his own tongue - with the discovery of his true self. All readers - even those not yet exposed to the writings of Elias Canetti - will appreciate the determining experiences within this self-portrait; the author’s relationship with his father who saved him from his fear of death: the ties to his mother who opened the world of literature to him; the experiences of everyday life amid societies sliding towards decline, even collapse. And for those familiar with Canetti’s fiction, essays, and criticism, the autobiography makes a dramatic connection: the overriding themes of his entire oeuvre have their origins in the events and associations of his early years.

Elias Canetti (1905-1994), Bulgarian-born author of the novel Auto-da-Fé, the sociological study Crowds and Power, and three previously published memoir volumes (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in my Ear, and The Play of the Eyes), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

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James Joyce by Italo Svevo. San Francisco. 1950. City Lights Books. Reprinted Paperback Edition after A limited Edition of 1600 numbered copies were privately issued by James Laughlin for the friends and supporters of New Directions.Very Good In Wrappers. unpaginated. paperback. The cover photograph of Joyce is by Man Ray, from The Museum of Modern Art (new York) Collection. That of Svevo (back cover) is from the collection of his widow and shows Svevo in 1892 at the age of 31. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   A lecture delivered in Milan in 1927 on James Joyce by his friend Italo Svevo. In 1912 Italo Svevo met James Joyce, and it is Joyce that we have to thank, not only for calling attention to him at that time, but for persuading him to continue writing.

ITALO SVEVO was born in Trieste in 1861 and was given a commercial education in Germany. CONFESSIONS OF ZENO was published in 1923 and was immediately hailed by European critics as the finest Italian novel. At the time of his accidental death in 1928 Svevo was one of   the best known and most successful businessmen in Triesie, though he was only beginning to enjoy fame as a writer. UNA VITA, his first novel, appeared in 1892 and was followed by SENILITA in 1898. In 1912 Italo Svevo met James Joyce, and it is Joyce that we have to thank, not only for calling attention to him at that time, but for persuading him to continue writing. The war kept Svevo away from business and gave him the opportunity. The fact that writing was never his means of livelihood made it possible for him to disregard tradition and slowly develop his own introspective style.  

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Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett. New York. 1995. Penguin Books. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By David Blewett. 480 pages. The cover shows a detail of Lord George Graham in His Cabin by William Hogarth in the National Maritime Museum, London. 9780140433326.

RODERICK RANDOM was published in 1748 to immediate acclaim, and established Smollett among the most popular of eighteenth-century novelists. In this picaresque tale, Roderick Random suffers misfortune after misfortune as he drifts from one pummeling to another and he still somehow manages to keep his brand of fatalistic good humor.  

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Narrated by an unheroic, apparently rudderless hero named Random, Smollett's wildly energetic and entertaining novel is held together not least by the narrator's outrage and dismay. Although RODERICK RANDOM was first published anonymously, the secret of Smollett's authorship was soon discovered, with the result that many readers thought they recognized similarities between the life of the hero and that of his creator. Certainly Roderick Random's early years - disinherited and without wealth and influence - and his university career, apprenticeship and service as a naval surgeon, vividly reflect the experiences of the author. How Random learns to survive the fickle hand of fortune, recovers his long-lost father, marries his beloved Narcissa, and dispatches his enemies is the stuff, not of autobiography, but of a novel which profoundly satirizes the moral chaos of its times. Dickens and Thackeray, among other great Victorians, applauded Smollett for his wit and invention, and in RODERICK RANDOM we enjoy the novel of a pioneer opening up the frontiers of fiction.

Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 – 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens. George Orwell admired Smollett very much. His novels were amended liberally by printers; a definitive edition of each of his works was edited by Dr. O. M. Brack, Jr. to correct variants.

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Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, & The Black Working Class by Robin D. G. Kelley. New York. 1994. Free Press. 351 pages. Jacket illustration by Diedra Harris-Kelley. 0002916706.

When Kelley opened the book by describing everyday acts of rebellion while working in a McDonald's in Pasadena, California, I knew this was a book for me. RACE REBELS draws attention to 'ordinary' people and their acts of personal and everyday protest and resistance. This is the kind of history that you don't always find in your history books.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   The annals of both African American and labor history are filled with heroic figures and dramatic protest movements. The strikes, marches, and civil rights struggles that make up the main historical events were by nature extraordinary episodes led by extraordinary personalities. But what of ordinary events and ordinary people? What of the more personal and everyday forms of protest and resistance? What of the radical and underground movements that rarely find a place in African American history? In an unprecedented tour through a previously hidden layer of history, RACE REBELS demonstrates exactly how the cultural world can be a political one. Robin D. G. Kelley makes visible hidden streams of black working-class resistance in the United States, and sheds new light on aspects of black politics and culture that most scholars have dismissed as marginal to the 'main events. ' Examining the words and deeds of African Americans who often found themselves at odds with the black middle class as well as with racist whites, Kelley argues that these men and women created strategies of resistance, and even entire subcultures, that have remained outside mainstream African American politics. They rebelled against both racist oppression and middle-class 'race politics', and - in the South, in particular - did so in a way that made them appear less threatening than they really were. Whether they were masking acts of industrial sabotage with Sambo imitations, or loud-talking a white conductor from the back of a segregated trolley, they encoded their strategies of resistance in order to cover their tracks. Here, for the first time, black America's 'race rebels' are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present. From movements like communism and civil rights: to places such as work, home, and the public sphere; to cultural arenas such as fashion in Malcolm X's time and gangsta rap in our own, Kelley finds black working-class people fighting battles many of us never imagined, using weapons many of us never knew existed.

Robin Davis Gibran Kelley (born March 14, 1962) is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), and from 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University (NYU) as well the chairman of NYU's history department from 2002 to 2003. Robin Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. In the summer of 2000, Dr. Kelley was honored as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught and mentored a class of sophomores, as well as wrote the majority of the book Freedom Dreams. During the academic year 2009–10, Kelley held the Harmsworth Chair of American History at Oxford University, the first African-American historian to do so since the chair was established in 1922. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

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Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector. New York. 2012. New Directions. paperback. 88 pages. Translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler. 9780811219907.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   New translation by Stefan Tobler. Introduction by Benjamin Moser. In the forty years since its publication toward the end of its author’s life, Agua Viva, an unordered meditation on the nature of life and time, has exercised a powerful influence on Brazil’s greatest artists: one musician read it one hundred and eleven times. This new translation shows why, in a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically radical as Clarice Lispector’s, this strange and hypnotic work stands out as a particularly magnificent triumph. ‘Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce.’ - Edmund White. ‘A penetrating genius.’ - Donna Seaman, Booklist. ‘A truly remarkable writer.’ - Jonathan Franzen.

CLARICE LISPECTOR (1925-1977) was one of the most significant twentieth-century Brazilian writers. Her works range from essays to novelistic fiction, short stories, and children’s literature. Lispector is best known in Latin America and Europe; only recently have some of her works been translated from Portuguese into English. Other English translations include THE PASSION ACCORDING TO C. H., FAMILY TIES, AN APPRENTICESHIP OR THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, THE APPLE IN THE DARK, and THE HOUR OF THE STAR.

STEFAN TOBLER is a translator from Portuguese and German. He won the English PEN Writers in Translation prize.

BENJAMIN MOSER’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector was acclaimed as ‘a fascinating and welcome introduction to a writer whose best work should be better known in this country’ (Dwight Garner, The New York Times).

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Spies of the Balkans: A Novel by Alan Furst. New York. 2010. Random House. hardcover. 268 pages. Jacket design by Robbin Schiff. 9781400066032.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Greece, 1940. In the port city of Salonika, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. As Adolf Hitler plans to invade the Balkans, spies begin to circle--and Costa Zannis, a senior police official, must deal with them all. He is soon in the game, working to secure an escape route for fugitives from Nazi Berlin that is protected by German lawyers, Balkan detectives, and Hungarian gangsters--and hunted by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, as war threatens, the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis, that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the dark side of Salonika society, and the wife of a shipping magnate. With extraordinary historical detail and a superb cast of characters, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to fight back against the world's evil. 

Alan Furst (born February 20, 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called 'an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene,' whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern Europe peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944.

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Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower. New York. 1999. January 1999. Knopf.  0679438092.  491 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph: Halifax, 1948, by Bill Brandt. Jacket design by Archie Ferguson.

FROM THE PUBLISHER - 

DARK CONTINENT is a searching history of Europe’s most brutal century. Stripping away the comforting myths and illusions that we have grown up with since the Second World War, Mark Mazower presents an unflinching account of a continent locked in a finely balanced struggle between tolerance and racial extermination, imperial ambition and national self-determination, liberty and the tyrannies of Right and Left. It is an attempt to trace the origins of ‘Western values’ - the ideological terms we now live by - and to ask what remains of the struggles of previous generations. Instead of seeing Europe as the natural home of freedom and democracy, Mazower argues that it was a frequently nightmarish laboratory for social and political engineering, inventing and reinventing itself through war, revolution and ideological competition. Fascism and communism should be regarded not as exceptions to the general rule of democracy, but as alternative forms of government that attracted many Europeans by offering different solutions to the challenges of the modern world. By 1940 the prospects for democratic government looked bleak, and Europe’s future seemed to lie in Hitler’s hands. Yet freedom was given another chance with the defeat of the Nazi New Order, and it prevailed decades later across the continent with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Mazower’s extraordinarily skilled and insightful analysis provides us with a new perspective on events of the century now drawing to a close. From the beginnings of the First World War to the establishment of the European Union, he depicts a battle for hearts and minds that reached more deeply than ever before into the daily lives of ordinary people. Vividly written and vigorously argued, DARK CONTINENT presents both a comprehensive history of twentieth-century Europe and a provocative vision of its future.

Mark Mazower is Reader in History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the prizewinning INSIDE HITLER’S GREECE: THE EXPERIENCE OF OCCUPATION, 1941-44. He writes and broadcasts regularly on current developments in the Balkans.

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Sembene Ousmane

(Born  January 1, 1923)

   Ousmane Sembene (January 1, 1923 or January 8, 1923 – June 9, 2007), who was born into a Senegalese fishing family in 1923. Essentially self-educated, he became a fisherman just like his father: 'I have earned my living since I was 15,' Sembene says. He moved to Dakar until the outbreak of World War Two, when he was drafted into the French army and saw action in Italy and Germany. Returning to Senegal for a short time, Sembene realized that in order to further his literary ambitions he would have to move to France. He went to Marseilles where he worked as a docker, joined the French Communist Party, and became a union organizer. He also began writing. His output has been prodigious. Le Docker noir appeared in 1956, a semi-autobiographical novel written in Marseilles; followed a year later by Oh Pays, mon beau peuple! about the problems of re-adaptation encountered by an African returning home with a French wife and new ideas. Three years later, Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu was published. In 1962 Ousmane wrote Voltaique, a volume of short stories which included the story La Noire de ... which he later turned into a prize-winning film. A fourth novel, L' Harmattan, was released in 1964, after which Ousmane had the opportunity to study at the Moscow film school. Two more short novels - Véhi Ciosane ou Blanche Genese (White Genesis), and Le Mandat (The Money-Order) - followed, the latter becoming a film that won a prize at the Venice film festival and established Ousmane's reputation as a director. In 1973 another novel, Xala, was published, going on to become one of a series of successful films. Ousmane's latest novel appeared in 1981 - the massive two-volumed work Le Dernier de l'empire. Heinemann has published several of Ousmane's novels in translation: Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu as God's Bits of Wood, Le Mandat suivi de Véhi Ciosane as The Money-Order with White Genesis, and Xala. Le Docker noir appeared in 1987, as Black Docker.

 Ousmane Sembene's most famous novel, GOD'S BITS OF WOOD, tells the story of workers who go on strike in 1947-48 on the Dakar-Niger railway.  It is a vivid and moving novel, evincing all of the colour, passion and tragedy of those decisive years in the history of West Africa. Because the author is a perceptive documentarist and social critic as well as a fine writer, GOD'S BITS OF WOOD does more than recount a fictional version of the Senegalese workers who struggled for unionization in the late 1940's. It also accurately describes the French West African institutional setting of that period and vividly conveys glimpses of native culture as it existed beneath the yoke of colonization. Traditional African values are dramatically portrayed as they conflict with the need for change and for acceptance of alien ideas in order to effect independence from oppression. The characters, however, are not mere vehicles for these historical and cultural themes, but human beings whose enormous tasks serve to underscore their strengths and frailties. The agonies they experience at having to place priorities on values, goals and personal relationships perhaps parallel those of any people who hold freedom necessary for life. 

 ‘My client’s guilt seems proven simply through the colour of his skin. He is the beast capable of anything, the savage who drinks the blood of his victims.’ Diaw Falla, the black docker, is highly regarded in his community - a little Africa in the south of France. His toil in the docks, a perpetual and unequal rivalry of bone against steel, is directed to one end, to finance his true obsession, writing. He is driven on by the hope he has invested in his masterpiece; the salvation which will raise him above his daily hardships and lead to fame and happiness. But he is a victim of a society in which he is constantly on trial, and in which all trust is misplaced. In this, his first novel, Sembene Ousmane, the leading French African writer and film maker, draws on his own experiences and the problems of racism, prejudice and injustice to recreate vividly the uneasy atmosphere of the Marseilles docklands, and France, in the 1950s

 From the author of such acclaimed novels as GOD’S BITS OF WOOD and BLACK DOCKER, these two novellas deal with harsh realities. In Niiwam, an agonised father carries the corpse of his son on a bus from one side of Dakar to the other— there is a meeting of the living and the dead, the contemporary and the traditional. And in Taaw, a poverty-stricken family rise up against a tyrannical father. ‘(In Niiwam and Taaw) Ousmane, a praised filmmaker, succeeds in turning his prose into something most visual. Each new event is written as another frame might be filmed, the author’s eye like a camera — focusing in on different characters- with special intensity.’ Pretoria News ‘ . . . the novellas, while dealing with sombre, almost brutal themes, have a wealth of character, detail and humour which underlie serious matters.’ - The New African.

A biting satire about the downfall of a businessman-polygamist who assumes the role of the colonializer in French-speaking Africa. XALA is the story of a El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, a rich businessman struck by what he believes to be a curse of impotence (‘xala’ in Wolof) on the night of his wedding to his beautiful, young third wife. El Hadji grows obsessed with removing the curse through visits to marabouts, but only after losing most of his money and reputation does he discover the source to be the beggar who lives outside his offices, whom he wronged in acquiring his fortune.

 In Sembene Ousmane's THE LAST OF THE EMPIRE, Senegal’s President, Leon Mignane, has mysteriously vanished. His Cabinet splits into rival factions and popular unrest grows - until the Army steps in. The elderly Minister of Justice comes to see himself as the survivor of an era of corruption and compromise that the young now rightly reject as ‘the last of the Empire.’

This collection of finely crafted short stories focuses on a theme of universal significance: the struggle for the liberation of the human spirit against both physical and psychological oppression. In the title story, ‘Tribal Scars,’ Ousmane poses the intriguing question of how and why Black Africans began the custom of scarring their faces and bodies. Through a creative leap into the past, Ousmane suggests that ritual scarring began as an act of defiance against Western slavers and over time became a symbol of African strength and pride. The story stands as one of the most powerful commentaries in literature on both the inhumanities of slavery and man's ingenuity for endurance and survival against overwhelming odds. ‘Tribal Scars’ will haunt the conscience of every reader, Other stories in the collection show how even during the post-independence era in Africa, Africans remain culturally shackled by some of the same chains that bound their ancestors. In his charming ‘Love in Sandy Lane’ he shows himself to be a relentless critic of his fellow Africans who sacrifice authentic love relationships for the sham glory of imitating the former European ruling class. ‘The Promised Land,’ a story which Ousmane made into a prize-winning film entitled ‘Black Child,’ paints a tragic picture of a young African girl's search for a better life in France only to find herself subjected to a form of modern slavery. Ousmane's message is clear and relevant: slavery in the past is not so different from slavery today; the first scarred the physical being, the second the soul. Many of the stories alto raise the question of the rights of women in African society. In ‘The Bital's Fourth Wife,’ Ousmane satirizes Musttm attitudes toward divorce, and in ‘Her Three Days,’ he harshly attacks polygamy by painting a portrait of a woman who is no longer favored by her husband. ‘Letters from France’ depicts the tragedy of a young girl who is forced by her father to marry a very old man. Taken together, these stories represent a call for women to reject the oppression of tradition and assert their rights. ‘Ousmane merits wide readership as a writer of deep humanity.’—Library Journal 'The stories in this collection clearly illustrate Ousmane's versatility and ability to shape many of the raw experiences of his life into artistic realities. He has given us the chance to embrace a wide range of African realities.’ —Charles Larson, from the Introduction. Sembene Ousmane is a popular West African novelist, playwright, and prizewinning film producer. He is the author of numerous books.

 Ousmane's theme in both of these novellas is the state of modern Africa. Dieng's experience of bureaucratic incompetence and deceit in The Money Order leads him eventually to a public act of despair, while in White Genesis Ousmane captures the decline of a way of life through a tragic tale of incest. His vision is not, however, cynical or negative. The special excitement of his work lies in his ability, even in describing the destruction of a village or the expulsion of a lone mother with child, to see an ever-present, creative opportunity for regeneration. Sembene Ousmane is one of the leading French African writers. Born in Senegal, he worked variously as a fisherman, plumber and mason, and began to write while employed as a docker in Marseilles. His work, which includes novels, short stories and films, is characterized by a special closeness to the lives of ordinary people. He is recognized internationally and this collection won a prize at the Dakar International Festival. The Money Order went on, as a film, to win a prize at the Venice Film Festival. 'On the basis of these two first rate novelettes, Sembene Ousmane must surely rank as one of Africa's finest writers.' Eustace Palmer

A biography of Sembene Ousmane -  

 Gadjigo, Samba. Ousmane Sembene: the Making of a Militant Artist. Bloomington. 2010. Indiana University Press. 9780253221513. Translated by Moustapha Diop. Foreword by Danny Glover. 189 pages. paperback. Cover photos: front, courtesy of Thomas Jacob and back (top), courtesy of Ousmane Sembene: back (bottom).

FROM THE PUBLISHER -  Samba Gadjigo presents a unique personal portrait and intellectual history of novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Though Sembène has persistently deflected attention away from his personality, his life, and his past, Gadjigo has had unprecedented access to the artist and his family. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Sembène and contributes a critical appraisal of his life and art in the context of the political and social influences on his work.Beginning with Sembènes life in Casamance, Senegal, and ending with his militant career as a dockworker in Marseilles, Gadjigo places Sembéne into the context of African colonial and postcolonial culture and charts his achievements in film and literature. This landmark book reveals the inner workings of one of Africa’s most distinguished and controversial figures.

Samba Gadjigo is Professor of French at Mount Holyoke College.