World Literature Today – July 01, 2019

Nota Bene

James Sturm

Off Season

Drawn & Quarterly

Graphic novelist extraordinaire

James Sturm returns with this quiet

but turbulent story of a marriage in

decay, played out against the back-

drop of the 2016 US presidential

election and its aftermath. As atten-

tive to its sense of place as to its

emotionally guarded characters, Off

Season promises an hour of thought-

ful reading accompanied by under-

stated but sturdy visual storytelling.

Takarabe Toriko

Heaven and Hell

Trans. Phyllis Birnbaum

University of Hawai‘i Press

This chilling autobiographical account

of author Takarabe Toriko’s childhood

in the Japanese-established puppet

state of Manchukuo in northeast China

details the haunting brutality and vio-

lence of the times through the eyes of

a precocious young girl. Toriko’s highly

venerated evocations on the nature of

her youth bring poignant authenticity

to the novel’s first movement and heart-

breaking realism to the second.

winning novelist and poet Katherena Ver-
mette. Her poetry spotlights and rejoices
in the multilayered façades of love through
postcolonial action. The opening section of
River Woman defines love as the vigor of
retrieval and repair in occasions of trauma
in every era. In this collection, Vermette
transports her readers into another world
and tries to reveal the secrets of the in-depth
reality of the universe. River Woman show-
cases Vermette’s distinguished and gifted
narrative: a quiet whisper that turns into a
roar; sparse words loaded with meaning.
This compact collection consists of a
series of imagistic poems that are challeng-
ing to comprehend. Vermette’s trope of the
river throughout the collection assembles the
maternal spirit within the verses to enhance
their universality. She repeatedly displays the
image of a river to distinguish the narration
of the poems by amalgamating her per-
sonal experiences and aboriginal history in a
dynamic and versatile technique that reflects
more than just words on the page.
Moreover, River Woman delineates Ver-
mette’s relationship with nature as artisti-
cally portrayed through her elegant style.
Vermette is able to depict the timelessness
of nature along with its beauty, power, and
destructiveness and how it affects the life
and history of mankind. Through her poetic
expressions that demonstrate her ardent
and keen observations of the environment,
the author tries to negotiate the balance
between man-made urban structures and
the natural world.
Thematically, the book
deals with history, cultural
bargaining, heritage, trau-
ma, love, loss, and the poet’s
Métis background along with
the duality and harmony she
feels around these themes.
The first part of this lively
collection contains the poet’s
approach toward emotional-
ly but largely uncontroversial
themed works, while in the
second part Vermette deals
with political aspects. In the

poem “new year’s eve 2013,” she writes:

“they say all people are equal / who cannot

agree / I say I will believe it / when prison

and poverty rates are the same / when thou-

sands of your women disappear / and you

do nothing.”

River Woman is embedded in a vivid

sense of place. Throughout the collection,

the extremes of brokenness and resilience

are grounded metaphorically in the discov-

ery of love and in confronting the wounds

of colonization.

Muhammad Imran

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Heike Geissler

Seasonal Associate

Trans. Katy Derbyshire. South Pasadena,

California. Semiotext(e). 2018. 240 pages.

Heike Geissler would like to be “a person

who is what she does,” but her writing and

translating work pays too little to buy the

occasional extras for her two sons and her

boyfriend. She therefore took the seasonal

(Christmas) job that she describes here at

an Amazon fulfillment center in Leipzig,

where she spends her days unpacking,

scanning, and stacking things. This is the

epitome of alienation, the complete anti-

thesis to her aspirations.

This alienation is particularly salient to

her, as a German from a country that no lon-

ger exists, because the GDR’s ideals, though

never remotely realized,

still resonate in her. But at

Amazon, “fulfillment” is for

everyone else; the customers’

satisfaction is all that mat-

ters; “associates” are totally

subservient to that Amazon

goal. Coming to work here

has, however, also allowed

her to realize that others with

jobs here like hers, unlike

the managers, have no other

alternative; they’ve been sent

by the employment office

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