332
PARTISAN REVIEW
with new surroundings and, even more significant, new words.
She reiterates in
Exit into History
the magical hold Poland still has
upon her. Throughout her travels she identifies with the younger gener–
ation of dissidents in every place she visits, certai n that if she hadn't emi–
grated with her parents, she would have been on the barricades with
them. Hoffman writes of the grayness of Warsaw as only a native can; of
the particular problems women face in Communi st and post-Communist
societies; of the strange return of the aristocracy in Poland; of a torturer
in Hungary who in the new freedom bumps into one of his former vic–
tims at the theater and trades pleasantries with her; of the Gypsies, whom
she describes as "the other Other in Europe"; and, in perhaps the most
moving and troubling passages in the book, of a trip to a Romanian or–
phanage where the hellish legacy of the Ceausescu regime can be read in
the decimated faces and bodies of young chi ldren. Wherever Hoffman
went, she caught the essence of each country, without missing even the
minutest of ironies in Eastern Europe's lurch towards freedom.
ROBERT LEITER
Connections
By Guy
Davenport:
A TABLE OF GREEN FIELDS.
N ew Directions. $21.95.
THE JULES VERNE STEAM BALLOON.
ECLOGUES.
DA VINCI'S BICYCLE.
TATLIN!Johns
Hopkins University Press. $12.95 each.
Few American writers connect as many things as Guy Davenport,
and few surpass him in the integrity of his connections. He writes about
historical figures with wildly pedantic accuracy, but his is not historical
fiction. Ranging through art and hi story with astonishing erudition, his
stories celebrate meadows, the pastoral, and camping trips. His fiction is a
record of difficult and sensuous philosophical thought, and his characters
make brilliant literary and artistic judgments, but the center of gravity in
his stories is a child's knowledge of the body's possibilities.
A Table oj Green Fields
is Davenport's seventh collection of fiction. As in
his other books, he offers two sorts of stories. The first recreates literary
