Books in Review
while she has at least come on her own.
These are mostly women, and, on top of
the hard and tedious work, they’re forced to
endure pervasive sexism. On one hand, for
example, Geissler’s male supervisor tells her
she would look better without those thick
glasses; on the other hand, the trainers tell
the women not to wear anything that would
cause the men to drop things.
Amazon apparently claims to have a flat
hierarchy (typical oxymoronic corporate-
speak), with just managers and workers,
and it’s simple: workers just have to do what
managers tell them. (There are company
spies, of course, who make sure no one tries
to sneak anything out.) And as these “Ossis”
(East Germans) seem endlessly needing to
be told, and read everywhere, the problem
is not the job or the work, it’s the worker;
it’s you. All you need to do is to finally adapt
yourself to the needs of the job. Quit just
thinking about yourself! It’s all about the
Amazon customer.
Geissler makes this alienation palpable,
in a way that very much engages the reader,
by alternating a first-person narrator with a
second-person one, the “I” of the writer tell-
ing the story of a “you,” the person working
for Amazon: “While you’re working... tired
and hungry... I’m sitting in a café... with
a friend drinking white wine spritzers.” The
gulf between these two personae has been
caught perfectly in Katy Derbyshire’s vivid
translation. To enjoy it yourself, you know
where to get the book instantly! (Geissler
shops at Amazon only for things she cannot
find anywhere else.)
Ulf Zimmermann
Kennesaw State University
Jamie James
Pagan Light: Dreams of
Freedom and Beauty in Capri
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- 336 pages.
Pagan Light takes the reader to Capri, a
small island just south of Naples, for a look
at its history as an artistic and sexual refuge,
where fact has
bled into fiction.
A quick portrayal
of the island’s ten-
ure as the seat of
power for Roman
emperor Tiberius
during the first
century CE opens
the narrative,
complete with
the conflicting
accounts of the
emperor’s sexual
extravagancies,
but most of the
book centers on the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, as Capri became home
to American and European expatriate artists
and writers.
Jamie James displays his depth of knowl-
edge as he connects the interweaving lives
of a plethora of these figures. Baron Jacques
d’Adelswärd-Fersen and Romaine Brooks
serve as the primary biographical figures—
the former to a slightly greater extent than
the latter—which helps steer the narrative
away from its tendency toward a who’s
who of Victorian- and Edwardian-era cre-
atives. As such, although a familiarity with
the period in America or Europe will help
calibrate the reader, much like a familiarity
with the beginning of the Roman Empire
grounds the reader in that section, the cen-
tral narrative provides enough stability and
rich detail to earn admiration from all.
For as knowledgable as James is of the
biographies and as interesting and cohesive
as he makes them, his language choices
occasionally leave more to be desired. Allud-
ing to Voltaire’s critiques, James describes
the accounts of Tacitus as “adept at wither-
ing abuse but deficient in facts” yet calls
those opposed “just as likely to be faulty as
the salacious slander,” acknowledging a uni-
versal limitation on objectivity. In such fash-
ion, purple prose slips into his own writing
from time to time, whether in hyperbolic
adjectives like “ridiculous” and “pathetic” or
phrases such as “bitchy dig” that come withsexist connotations. While not overwhelm-
ing, the scattering of such language can’t
help but temporarily take the reader out of
the narrative and reduce the author’s cred-
ibility as a historical commentator.
That said, James handles the discus-
sion of the island’s role as a queer haven
with a more careful hand, and he presents
this aspect without oversexualization or an
excessive flair for the dramatic. It retains a
matter-of-fact nature, which is welcome.
The book winds to a close by bringing
the reader up to the present day, and it leaves
off on a contemplative note. Is Capri on a
new trajectory for the twenty-first century?
Perhaps, James suggests, but if it is, it will still
be filled with the echoes of the past, which
continue to give fame and notoriety to an
otherwise insignificant break in the sea.
James Farner
University of OklahomaJoost de Vries
The RepublicTrans. Jane Hedley-Prôle. New York. Other
Press. 2019. 336 pages.In his wry but uneven second novel, Joost
de Vries kills off his most interesting charac-
ter almost immediately. Josip Brik—famed
historian and “generalissimo” to a would-
be “junta of colleagues”—tumbles to his
death from a hotel window in Amsterdam.106 W LT SUMMER 2019