BOOKS
And it always
be
there. As someone once said, that long, sad,
unfortunate island will be there after the last Indian and after the last
Spaniard and after the last African and after the last American and
after the last of the Cubans, surviving all disasters, eternally washed
over by the Gulf Stream: beautiful and green, undying, eternal.
467
The writing of History (if not History itself) shows here its circularity.
As in
Finnegans Wake,
the beginning and the end of this book consists
of a single phrase. Repetitive time, space closing into itself, the writing
of History produces a whole, tight, unified text. For the believers in
Utopias, this time may seem negative, dark, destructive. But for those
who believe in reality (and in the fiction of reality, and in the writing of
that fiction), this time is not negative at all. It is the only time we really
know, or can talk about: the time of writing which, like the island, is
always beautiful and green and eternal.
EMIR RODRiGUEZ MONEGAL
(Translated from the Spanish by David Pritchard and the author.)
THE WORLD OF WASP
THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER.
Alfred A. Knopf. $15.
The deceptively modest self-portrait that John Cheever
fashions in the preface to his newly collected
Stories
("Naive, provin–
cial ... almost always clumsy") well accords with our customary sense
of Cheever as a natural, as a self-reliant and largely homespun
historian of the manners and morals of the upper middle class. Despite
the elegant contrivances and highly figured language that have always
called plain attention to Cheever's exertions as a stylist in both his
novels and his shorter pieces, Cheever's image of himself as the
innocent realist is a tempting one to maintain.
One principal advantage is that it a llows us to suspend our moral
exasperation with Cheever's dreamy and passive characters by shifting
