notanotherbookreview

Other Places, Other Times by Robert Wexelblatt  (Pelekinesis)  is a collection of twenty-six short historical fictions. Thirteen of the stories are about Chen Hsi-wei, an imaginary peasant-poet of the Sui period, circa 600 C.E. As a boy, he  served the emperor and turned down material rewards for an education. He became a poet (though nobility found an educated peasant as implausible as a flying pig), Hsi-wei travelled the empire making verses, along with straw sandals for customers.  He often set up a sign for sandals in marketplaces, before looking for a corner to sleep in an inn or stable.  Often Hsi-wei's curiosity about people and places led him to incongruous events and mysteries. The poem,  The Madness of Nowa   sums up a strange murder he resolved for a skeptical magistrate. At a seasonal festival, a chance meeting inspired rare insight about time, nature and men. U nknown truths, injustices, fateful sorrow inspired poems.  After some year...

Peter Wortsman is good company; a raconteur known for his short fiction, stage plays, and translations, such as KONUNDRUM, a translation of Kafka that made me laugh. In EPIPHANY OF A MIDDLE-AGED PILGRIM: essays in lieu of a memoir , he relates   the trepidation of being middle aged, as well as the mysteries of a life half lived. In ( A forword) , he ruminates:  "The only difference between then and now is an accumulation of doubt. But doubt need not necessarily be debilitating. I dedicate these musings to the defining punctuation mark of middle age: the semicolon, a veritable hallmark of uncertainty." Wortsman can make the prosaic terra incognito, such as  First Memory , where a drawbridge and a child's fear of containing "pipi" merge. In  Rough Cuts , there's humorous swagger about the removal of a skin cancer like "a kind of shoot-out at the O.K. Corral." He also creates strangely beautiful moments that are absurd. In  Spirit Tree , a wild sapl...