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THE BREAK, a novel originally published in Italian (“L’Acchito,” 2007), is the second book by Pietro Grossi to be translated into English and made available in the United States. It follows the release of a collection of three novellas, FISTS (“Pugni,” 2006), from the same publisher, Pushkin Press, in an equally handsome paperback edition.

FISTS impressed me mightily (see review here). Its high point is the opening story which traces the coming of age of a young amateur fighter. The arc of that simple tale is reenacted on a larger canvas in THE BREAK. A stone-layer named Dino, still in his twenties and leading an uneventful life in the rural town of his forebears, suddenly must deal with two unsettling developments: his wife is pregnant and his old job disappears. He seizes on the idea of perfecting his talents at billiards (the form of the sport featured here is known as Italian billiards or Italian five-pins). He embarks on contests that will lead to a further maturity.

This is a beautifully realized novel in which Grossi fulfills the promise of his initial work.

Laying down a single word — craftsmanship — is the best way I can think of to describe the source of strength found in THE BREAK. It’s not a coincidence that Grossi spent two years of his apprenticeship period studying at the Holden School (La Scuola Holden) in Torino, Italy. The curriculum at that institution emphasizes mastery of narrative — storytelling in all of its guises, not just in the short story and novel, but also in the realms of radio, theater, film and web-based content.

An aside: profiles of Grossi often mention, misleadingly I believe, that he is a follower of the American writer J.D. Salinger. I find little or no evidence of Grossi imitating the American. The linking of the two writers may be nothing more than a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of the fact that the founders of the Holden School named it (yes) after Holden Caulfield, the unforgettable narrator of “The Catcher in the Rye”.

No one can deny the meticulous quality of Grossi’s writing. From the very first page of THE BREAK, the reader will notice the clean, fine construction of sentences and paragraphs, quickly-limned characters, and deft scene-setting, all of this well captured in Howard Curtis’ translation. Here is Dino, out on the street, sensing winter’s approach:

“The days were already drawing in. It was the beginning of that time of year when, as evening fell, people seemed to be wandering through a darkened theater.”

Grossi conveys the uncertainties Dino experiences via subtle phrases (usually disguised as ordinary descriptions) carefully positioned, piece by piece: “Dino couldn’t quite explain it”; “what the questions were he didn’t even know himself”; “maybe people had lost the habit”; “for some reason . . .”. There is a reiterated motif of how two persons’ physical closeness to each other discloses emotional information. One instance is the description of Dino as he and his wife Sofia occupy two corners of their tiny kitchen: “It had always made him feel good, being close to each other like this but slightly distant, and not talking.”

Grossi seems to know instinctively where to guide the reader and how best to do it. For example, only a few pages into the book Sofia reveals she is pregnant. The homey atmosphere Grossi creates for this initial scene is so old-fashioned your memory may naturally summon up the phrase, a woman “with child.” This thought is not unprompted, for just a few lines before the revelation Grossi had described for you the child-like nature of the parents-to-be: “They ate in silence, both sucking the soup from their spoons as softly as they could and playing their old game of trying to see shapes in the vegetables.” You have been smoothly guided to the emotional surprise: Characters, not yet fully formed adults, are about to become parents.

Less successful, because its obviousness is at odds with the subtlety of Grossi’s hand elsewhere, is the dominant metaphor of the novel — that of the billiards table and the psychological play enacted upon it. Still, this stand-in for life, fate and destiny is a seductive draw:

“Dino was here [at the billiards parlour] because he needed things to be clear and precise, to know where they were going to end, to know that there was still a piece of the world where lines and forces and movements followed exact trajectories, without frills, without flights of fancy.”

It occurs to me this description could serve equally well as Grossi’s personal credo as a writer.

The heart of the book is a love song to the pool hall and the passions unleashed there. On this ground alone, fans of the sport and fans of fictional depictions of its world (such as The Hustler) are likely to enjoy THE BREAK.

The novel’s 28 chapters average just seven pages each. This framework sets up a fade-in/fade-out rhythm that, along with other scenario-like elements, may remind you of expert film writing. However, it also points to what some readers may find to be a weakness in Grossi: his comforting conventionality. Seekers of the unconventional should steer clear. The characters and themes Grossi explores have reminded some critics of post-WWII neorealism in Italian cinema, with its emphasis on real lives and quiet tiny moments. I would add there are affinities to the kitchen-sink dramas of British and American playwrights of the 1950s (“Look Back in Anger”; “Marty”) that explored what Paddy Chayefsky called “the marvelous world of the ordinary.”

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A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

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THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH (La Maison de la Mort Certaine, 1944) is Albert Cossery’s first novel. It marks an apprentice writer’s transition from his first book, the collection of short stories titled “Men God Forgot” (1940), to the accomplished later novels for which he is best known.

The author introduces us to a group of Cairo inhabitants, a handful of impoverished families living in a rundown tenement located in the squalid Native Quarter. We get to meet them during a cold winter season that becomes “a course of unlucky days.”

They include Chehata, an out-of-work carpenter who has gone mad due to his inability to provide food for his wife and daughter; Rachwan Kassem, an oil stove repairman who succumbs to anger; Soliman El Abit, a melon peddler who succumbs to fear; Souka, a café singer in unrequited love with an abused married woman; Abd Rabbo, a street sweeper who selfishly abandons the neighborhood; Bayoumi, a monkey trainer who provides limited comic relief; Kawa, a man resigned to painful old age; and Ahmed Safa, a hashish addict who, alone among the band, can read and write.

The character most interesting to the modern reader, especially one who has followed the impact of the 2011 Arab Spring, is Abdel Al, an unemployed carter. It is he who, in the final third of the book, undergoes a personal awakening — a new political consciousness — that guides him, tentatively, to thoughts of revolt.

As for a plot, the book is meager. We witness a few unsuccessful attempts by the tenants to confront their landlord, Si Khalil, and force him to do something about a building in imminent threat of collapse. The notion of a house in ruins is an idea Cossery again would examine 55 years later in his final novel, “The Colors of Infamy“ (1999), whose plot turns on a catastrophe caused by a slum landlord’s indifference.

In this earlier story the crumbling tenement takes on a heavy — and some will say heavy-handed — symbolic weight as a sign of the corruption of Egypt’s social and political. We are reminded often that the crack in the tenement’s foundation is growing (“day by day its dimensions were becoming more alarming”).  As we learn more and more of the personalities and perilous individual status of these forgotten men, women and children, we also learn of their collective peril. Cossery repeatedly inserts in the mouth of one character after another the exclamation, “Don’t you know that the house is about to crash?”

Throughout his career Cossery was prone to florid writing, a dubious skill he eventually learned to apply selectively. Here in his first novel this tendency is wholly unchecked. For example, the carter’s eight-year-old son, wandering the neighborhood streets, is described as being “alone in the immense charnel house where men were murdered by torment and tyranny.” As well, there is a great amount of repetitive and tiresome text separating rare moments of prose that chill us with savage revelations.

As in better works by this author, an oppressive atmosphere prevails. Its cause is an unresolved tension between apathy (“The world could crumble, the world could rot; the tenants would not move”) and action (“the soul-stirring force of revolt”). The problem I had is Cossery’s avoidance of building a case either way. Readers will wonder, Where does the author stand?

One would imagine he stands with Abdel Al who comes to realize how man has “concealed within him, secrets that could shake the world.” Abdel seeks to be sustained “by something bigger than himself.” The education of Abdel Al (“there are certain things that I am just beginning to understand”) is finely evoked.

“Ever since I began to think about the misery in which we all live, I can feel ideas sprouting inside me like poisonous weeds. I am always trying to sort them out, but just when I’m about to grasp them, they suddenly retreat into the shadows. And I am never able to catch up with them . . . . He was filled with a feeling of impotence that tortured him like an open sore.”

“He realized that, by himself, he could do nothing. What could one man accomplish? A lone man was a powerless thing, fit only for sorrow and for tears. Abdel Al would have liked to see everyone aroused by the same feeling; he hoped for a universal awakening for those who were affected by a common misery and a mutual desire to live.”

How disappointing it is for the reader that his evolution of thought, so harrowingly relayed by Cossery, leads . . . nowhere.

The book concludes with a climactic confrontation between Abdel Al and the landlord Si Khalil in an unnamed public square (could it be Tahrir Square?). It peters out with a mere exchange of insults and slogans. The tenant warns of an eventual “vengence of an oppressed people that nothing can stop”; the landlord responds: “You’ll be dead long before that.”

It is as if Cossery lost the nerve to pursue this grand theme.

“The House of Certain Death” is currently out of print. The likelihood of its revival in today’s uncertain publishing world is slim. Ardent and adamant Cossery readers will want to track down a used copy, if for no other reason that to trace the early development of this excellent writer. But the literary explorer should be prepared to find an awkward book, one lacking the controlled pace, the sly humor, and the intelligent talk that enlivens prime Cossery.

For those treats, check out the newly translated editions of the author’s “Proud Beggars” and “The Jokers,” both published by New York Review Classics.

Note: My reading was of the 1949 hardback edition of “The House of Certain Death” translated by Stuart B. Kaiser, published by New Directions as book 11 in its Directions Series. If ND decides to re-issue the books, news of that will likely be posted here.

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This novella by Ben Marcus (with illustrations by the artist Matthew Ritchie) is currently unavailable except from a handful of used book dealers who are selling copies at forbidding prices. What a shame.

The Father Costume was published in 2002 by Artspace Books as part of a series featuring “collaborations of image and text by today’s most innovative artists challenging the culture in which we live.” Here’s how Marcus describes his interaction with Richie:

We got together and talked a little bit about stuff that interested us. He’s really into physics and creation stories and origin theories of the universe, yet his relationship to all that heavy stuff is really light and playful and subversive. When you look at his paintings, there’s certainly nothing didactic or overbearing about them. He wants painting, essentially, to visualize the first moments of time. We threw some ideas around and decided to make a book. I wrote something and I showed it to him. He made some images and we got together again to mess around some more. There’s the book.

The book ought to be brought back into print, for the simple reason that I can think of no more exemplary introduction to the accomplishments of Ben Marcus, a so-called “experimental” writer who in these 45 pages belies that label’s negative implication of inscrutability by producing a work of deep emotion and resonance.

On the immediate level The Father Costume is a family drama told from the awed perspective of a child who attempts to follow the unfathomable actions of his father. It is narrated by one of two brothers removed by their father from their ancient home to escape some amorphous danger. They embark on a sea voyage that takes an ominous turn. As strange and at the same time as genuinely moving as Donald Barthelme’s affecting tale, The Dead Father (1975), the book bears an even closer kinship to Jesse Ball’s The Curfew (2011) which centers on the bond between a father and his daughter and is also set in a time and place not exactly of this world. Marcus previously examined relationships within nuclear families in Notable American Women: A Novel (2002) and does so again in the upcoming The Flame Alphabet (2012).

Veteran readers of Marcus know that the author achieves his signature brand of queasy disconnection and anxiety by means of language manipulation. He moves way beyond the relatively simple language games of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (where nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, are replaced with nonsense word counterparts) — upping the ante by constructing sentences with familiar but “wrong” words, crafting images and actions that catch you off guard. Early in the The Father Costume the son notes, for example, “I dotted our windowsills with listening utensils, in case a message came in the night.” The reader must remain nimble in order to negotiate the uncertain ride of these games. What serves you best in this mythical and fantastical universe is a comfort level with surrealism and a willingness to tap into your intuitive side. As well you must also accept Marcus’ obsession over certain objects (here, cloth, costumes, lenses), rituals, and failures of communication. Early on the son explains, “I could not read fabric. I had a language problem.” He notes that “the antenna of our radio had been soaking in honey overnight.” Later he confesses, “My brother and I would have attacked my father with chopping motions until he had been silenced. Keeping maybe his hair, just in case.”

Some of this oddness is amusing, but all sense of playfulness disappears as the story reaches its climax with violence and death. That is when essential questions are unavoidable. What is the meaning of the cryptically-described “costumes” the father makes for himself and his sons? Are these their personas? Socially-imposed behaviors? God’s constraints? Can The Father Costume be viewed as a religious allegory, and a specifically Christian one? At the end of the story the surviving son wonders whether “there may be a father operating on the other side of the glass.” In an interview C. B. Smith conducted with Marcus devoted solely to The Father Costume the author explains: “The narrator has no idea what is really happening. That kind of innocence appealed to me, the trust you put in someone whose designs are beyond your comprehension.”

More telling to me is how in the final pages the narrator finds solace in reviewing his martyred brother’s voice: “And though I do not understand the words, I enjoy their defeat of silence . . . I know them to be the right ones, the ones that someone had to say. I am happy that they are mine now.”

A few words on the book as a physical object. Fascinating to me is the book designer’s decision to take cues from childrens books of an earlier age. This includes retro 1950s-style thick cardboard covers whose edges are cut to expose gray paper pulp, as if this were much-handled book. Adding to the worn look is a spine wrapped in black cloth tape, as if Dad had repaired the falling apart pages with a trusty spool of old-style electrical tape. Inside the front cover is a place inviting the young owner to fill in his or her name in clumsy block letters. All of this adds a sense of innocence to a challengingly adult book.

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This slim volume contains 30 poems, short to medium in length. Thirteen are one-pagers, twelve are two pages, five are three.

Some of the poems in MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY are opaque. An exuberant talker, O’Hara on occasion goes on auto-pilot erudition spills, and when this is applied to a subject of limited interest the result can be a poem that may not speak to most readers, especially those of us not thoroughly tutored.

Yet I think I am like most of his readers who forgive him this, knowing that with the next poem or the one after the next he will return to his naturally communicative, pleasure-giving mode.

What the American poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth once noted about O’Hara is right on the money: Each of the poems has the air of a “fresh start.” When encountering the best of them it is as if your eyes, long occluded, open suddenly onto the world.

This being O’Hara, there are newly-coined and revived words and phrases (cupiditously; buttered bees); thoughts of suicide, express and implied, and premonitions of violence; paeans to pop culture icons (“For James Dean”); a campy fandom of Hollywood (“To the Film Industry in Crisis”); tossed off witticisms (“It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so”); a devotion to New York (“I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life”); and, finally, intimate love poems that draw us near.

He has an original voice, and yet I enjoy the occasions when he behaves as other poets, like Ginsberg or the Romantics, or even Shakespeare, who I swear I hear in the poem “Radio.” It begins:

Why do you play such dreary music

on Saturday afternoon, when tired

mortally tired I long for a little

reminder of immortal energy?

This shares the questioning voice found in Shakespeare’s sonnets (the constant Why? Who? What?) as well as the author’s expression of mock petulance — disappointment turning into complaint turning into self-pity — such as in Sonnet 34:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day

And make me travel forth without my cloak

To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way?

For some reason I like to read O’Hara’s poetry while standing, or walking around a room.

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Because the three works in this collection (“Fists,” “Horses,” and “The Monkey”) occupy 52, 45 and 41 pages respectively, some critics want to consign them to the category of the novella. I reject that label. It is too easily misunderstood as a warning to the reader to expect an awkward or forbidding reading experience — that the writing will lacking the quick digestibility of the short story and the embracing sweep of the novel. Instead, I think the pieces Pietro Grossi has written are best considered simply to be “stories.”

All three of these tales boast an uncommon degree of “readability.” Grossi’s unadorned prose drives forward a trio of plots that, while wildly different, share the common theme of young men discovering themselves at crossroads in their lives. Most notably in the title story, the reader is carried into an engrossing story you will long remember.

The first story, “Fists,” is the only one told in the first person, and the winning personality of the unnamed, adolescent narrator grabs you from the start. Though he is at heart “studious, nerdy, conventional, obedient,” echoes of Holden Caulfield can be heard in his rebellious talk (“I hated the piano. I hated Mozart and Bach and that deaf freak Beethoven”) and his simultaneous, sentimental acquiescence (“I don’t know, maybe if you convince yourself of something, in the end you get it”). His major act of rebellion that sets the plot in motion is demanding his mother permit him to take boxing lessons. She reluctantly agrees. Soon enough, as a amateur junior welterweight, he excels in sparring, acquires the nickname “Dancer,” and is lavished with praise (“so accurate and fast and technical”). But he remains ambivalent about fighting a regulation bout — until, that is, he watches the work of someone with an opposite style (“all hunched and as closed up as a ball of granite”).

Midpoint in the narrative, training begins for the 7-round fight between the Dancer and the Goat, and even if you’ve had your fill of “Rocky” movies I defy you not to be swept up in the momentum. Boxing stories of course can sink under the weight of metaphorical and symbolic meaning — life, fate, destiny and all the rest. Yet Grossi masterfully avoids cliché and nimbly negotiates through the formula. The author keeps the reader’s focus on the uneasy transition from child to man. As the young narrator explains: “Suddenly reality had put itself back together in front of my eyes just as it was, at its own speed, and that terrified me.”

The second story, “Horses,” is set in an unspecified territory and traces the path to maturity of two adolescent brothers whose father has given each of them a horse. Here the code of masculinity takes its cues from the American West. Elements in the story reminded me, favorably, of John Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.” Some readers may say Grossi tries to stuff too many ideas into this framework, but I myself was entranced from start to finish.

The final story, “The Monkey,” again switches setting, style and tone. In contemporary Rome, a thirty-something but still adolescent screenwriter is asked to come to the aid of childhood friend. As in many a sex comedy (especially those of the late 1950s and early 1960s), Nico is a man lost among women, frazzled by his needy girlfriend, his wacky mother, his abusive female agent, and his too-understanding ex-wife. Grossi orchestrates the proceedings with droll wit and laugh-out-loud vignettes (he’s a master of the satiric telephone conversation).

If there is a lesson common to all three parts of this splendid book, it is found in the observation of one of the brothers in “Horses”:

“Life was always like that, Daniel thought: something was always missing, whereas the nice thing about stories was that everything that should be there was there.”

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MEN GOD FORGOT (Les hommes oubliés de Dieu, 1941) is a small but powerful collection of five short stories set in a squalid neighborhood of Cairo. These heart-breaking tales (averaging 20 pages each), are populated with living and breathing characters: men, women and children consigned to fate’s lowest rungs.

This book will be of interest to readers who have encountered one or more of the Albert Cossery’s later novels. In it you get to experience the novice writer flexing his muscles, deciding what modes and styles suit his temperament, testing themes, failing and succeeding. You’ll discover Cossery was from the very start a master of the psychologically astute observation. You’ll find the jaundiced air that pervades subsequent works has not yet appeared. Instead what dominates at this early stage is a passionate anger: “A hot substance penetrates, flows through life, burning it’s creatures, waking monsters in the bodies of defenseless children, looting everything in its infernal rage and bringing thirst, thirst to everything: lips, the soul, the eyes, the flesh. Ah, who will deliver men from this hell?”

He can pause to be humorous: “Hanafi continued his sleep just where he had left off, as one takes up an interrupted task.” (The pleasures of indolence if not sleep will be a recurrent theme of his work.)

Worth comparing also is the notorious misogyny of his later novels. Here there is little or none of that. In fact, the respect Cossery grants to the emotional strength and sexual integrity of Faiza, the girl in the book’s second tale (“The Girl and the Hashish-Smoker”) is quite remarkable. Cossery devotes the opening paragraphs to a description, from her perspective, of the title characters’ love-making: “The enormous Nile with its treacherous currents flowed in her. ( … ) Her joy swelled, rose as a wave rises. She was confounded with joy, became joy itself.”

It is reported Albert Camus, who was himself born into poverty in North Africa (Algeria), was favorably impressed when he read MEN GOD FORGOT soon after its initial publication. Did Camus see in it a kindred spirit, another incipient humanist? Was Camus disappointed by the direction Cossery took in his later fictions?

MEN GOD FORGOT is currently out of print. The edition I read was a 1963 paperback reprint of Harold Edwards’ translation from the French, printed in England and published by City Lights Books (the San Francisco shop of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and the Beats). New Directions and New York Review Books Classics are currently re-issuing other volumes of Cossery — most recently “The Colors of Infamy” (which I reviewed here a few weeks ago) and “Proud Beggars” (on my reading list). Here’s hoping one of those publishers sponsors a fresh edition of MEN GOD FORGOT

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TRES is a compilation of three long poems, one written in 1981 and two in 1993, before Bolaño turned his energy to the composition of his major novels. It is a companion to another collection of poetry, Los perros románticos (“The Romantic Dogs”), which contains 43 poems dating from 1980 to 1998. Both volumes first appeared (in Spanish) in 2000.

“The movement of a free mind at play” is how the American writer Cynthia Ozick once described the quality of a well-written essay. I think it’s a suitable description for what readers find most appealing about Bolaño’s writing, no matter its ostensible literary form or its disruption of those forms.  All of his output — from the sprawling novels like “2666″ and “The Savage Detectives” to the short stories to “Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003″ — is of a piece.  His execution of the subject matter in tripartite TRES — the playing out of a love affair; the feverish road trip of a band of musicians traversing Chile, Peru, and Ecuador; and the extended set of dreams in which Bolaño defers to his fellow authors (among them, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Archibald MacLeish, and Carson McCullers) — follows Ozick’s credo.

The fact that TRES is labelled poetry is an irrelevance. Bolaño transgresses boundaries. If you are otherwise a fan of Bolaño’s novels and stories but generally don’t like “poetry,” my advice is to ignore the poetry tag.

One disappointment I had with the book was the relative paucity of Bolaño’s signature epigrammatic statements on art and life. Although the works were at times compelling, I think that for anyone new to this author, there are more auspicious places to start. My candidates: “By Night in Chile” or “The Savage Detectives.”

To state that TRES weighs in at 176 pages is deceptive. The book is actually a quick read because of abundant white space on the pages of the two prose poems. If you are reading only the translated pages of this dual-language book, expect to spend 20 minutes or less with each of the three parts.  The original Spanish text appears on the left pages and the English translation (by Laura Healy) on the right. Kudos to the publisher, New Directions, for using not a common glued binding but a binding sewn with thread. This allows the book to stay open and flat for bilingual readers who wish to follow the flow of the words in both languages.

One disappointment is the absence of any helpful editorial content to explain the bare texts — if not annotations or notes, then at least an Introduction would have been a welcome feature. Until someone pens a critical biography of Bolaño to guide the serious reader, bits and pieces of background and context are accessible on the internet. As an Introduction to TRES, I recommend a lengthy, breezy but enlightening 2009 blog post (“The Best of Bolaño is Yet to Come,” signed “Rise”) written in anticipation of  the appearance of an English translation of the book. The blogger includes some insider comments from the translator Laura Healy.

After reading TRES, I found the following online reviews helped me better understand what I had read. All three are strong in analytical insights:

1.  A review by Dawn Marie Knopf in The Faster Times (“Sharp Instruments and Lynched Messiahs”) here

2.  A review by Andrew R. Chow in The Harvard Crimson (“Poetry Collection Introduces the Real Roberto Bolaño”) here

3.  A review by Miguel Jimenez (“Another Bolaño Book, Another Work of Genius”) here.

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A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

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Spring and All was first published in France in 1923 in an edition of 300 copies. Years later Wallace reflected on the book’s nonchalant, playful debut:”‘Nobody ever saw it — it had no circulation at all — but I had a bit of fun with it … Chapter headings are printed upside down on purpose, the chapters are numbered all out of order, sometimes with Roman numerals, sometimes with Arabic, anything that came in handy” (I Wanted to Write a Poem, pp. 36-37).

If you covet a one of those first edition copies, in fine condition, be prepared to shell out a thousand dollars or more.

The book’s contents have reappeared in subsequent Williams compendiums, but for those of you with a book collector’s sensibility, and for poetry readers who seek transport back to an earlier cultural era via the objects of that era (test: were you wide-eyed drinking in the set designs in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”?), this facsimile edition is the next best thing to holding the original.

In the decades since its original publication there’s been no shortage of sophisticated critical analysis of the meaning and significance of SPRING AND ALL. My amateur thoughts include a belief that the book’s once unorthodox mixture of prose and poetry sections has less power to bother readers of today. In the prose sections I grew to appreciate the gaps, the churn, the elisions, the introduction and abandonment of thoughts: we are witnessing a mind doing its work. When Williams delivers fully formed thoughts his breathing is apparent: I heard not the nervous, arhythmic and shallow breaths of today but the inhalations and exhalations of an earlier America, deep and full and sufficient to the ideas whose communication they carry.

I happen to like his use of commas.

There are stretches that have a dated feel (remember, the freshest cataclysm infecting Williams’ world view was The Great War) and some of his affections are now obscure (how many know who Dora Marsden was; or Alfred Kreymborg, whose writing Williams declares “still has value and will tomorrow have more”?). But hail the author’s ready audacity, as when he draws a broad conclusion about modern art trends by looking at a reproduction of a single painting by Juan Gris — and that reproduction not in color but in black and white! Especially in its epigrammatic statements on art and life, there is an affinity between Spring and All and Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit.

You reach page 74, Chapter XXII. You pause. It’s as if you’ve been meandering down a museum’s long corridor of displays of things interesting and things not so interesting and then you’re directed into an intimate side-room and brought face to face with a solitary object that hits you, your eye, your mind, with unexpected force: a sixteen-word poem about a red wheel barrow whose haiku economy proceeds to gestate in your presence.

To speak of the book itself, as physical object: it is sure to please. More meaty than the proverbial slim volume of poetry (it’s over 100 pages), this facsimile is finely constructed with clearly printed text on cream paper, wrapped in powder blue-gray covers that have a mysterious, sensuous, suede-like feel.

Williams writes: “The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.”

Let this better work be your pleasure.

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A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.

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Work produced in the final stretch of an artist’s career often displays the creator’s sense of freedom at the close. Simplicity, accessibility, brevity, lightness, and an avoidance of the over-determined often characterize these autumnal works. In the field of painting, think of the airy ribbons of primary colors on pure white fields in Willem DeKooning’s late period works, or the floating colored paper cut-outs of Matisse’s final years. Among writers, consider the lighthearted last novel of William Faulkner, “The Reivers” (reiver is an old-fashioned term for a raider, plunderer, or thief), and the joy Thomas Mann clearly had in sketching the progress of the morally flexible young hero of “Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years,” the novel left unfinished at the time of his death at age 80.

Put Albert Cossery’s “The Colors of Infamy” (Les Couleurs de l’Infamie) in that category. Written at age 85 after a decade and a half of silence since his previous publication, this final work, the shortest of his novels, fills a mere 92 pages. It offers a sketch of his constant themes and a handy summation of his lessons. Except for the very serious questions it touches upon, I would call it a light entertainment. All in all it provides a good entry point for new readers interested in sampling “the Voltaire of the Nile.”

On the streets of Cairo we follow three characters, each in his own way an outcast from society. Ossama is an educated but unemployed 23-year-old who has chosen to become a high-class pickpocket. He “instinctively grasped the flaw of a society based on appearance,” and so he dresses richly to more easily prey on wealthy marks, not unlike the con-man Felix Krull who learns that society operates under the premise that illusion is reality. Nimr is Ossama’s street-smart teacher in the thieving trade, and is somewhat affronted that Ossama has gone upscale. Karamallah is a middle-age writer and intellectual whose rebellion against the corrupt system has led to imprisonment followed by exile to his family’s mausoleum. The book’s slender plot gains motion when these three come together to decide how best to confront an injustice. A shoddily constructed apartment building recently collapsed, leaving 50 dead, and Ossama acquires an incriminating letter that firmly assigns culpability for the horror to a powerful real estate developer. What’s to be done with such knowledge?

The open-ended discussions these three engage in include age-old questions. Is it possible to be virtuous and become rich? Is the world complicated and absurd — an idea “dreamed up by illustrious thinkers from cold climes” — or does the world still possess an “Edenic simplicity” of a kind that all men can enjoy, as Cossery’s stand-in, Karamallah, believes? Is happiness within our reach? And to speak of an issue of critical importance to societies aspiring to fairness and equal opportunity: Is business “unimaginable without corrupt networks”?

This is a novel of ideas that will impress you with its contemporary resonance. I was immediately startled by the opening pages of this 1999 novel, when Ossama surveys a bustling Tahrir Square and wonders about the future of its denizens (the author unaware the site was to be transformed during the 2011 Arab Spring into a locus of revolution). Does Cossery have something to say to an America that today is exhibiting Egypt-like traits: a growing cohort of educated but unemployed youth; a growing inequality of wealth; a growing sense that 1% have inordinate power over the fate of the other 99%? Here is a book to talk about.

The translation from the French, by Alyson Waters, is excellent, smoothly capturing Cossery’s rich and elegant prose. For those interested in reading an insightful online interview with the translator, Google the phrase, Alyson Waters on the Colors of Infamy. Some may find Cossery’s prose old-fashioned or overwrought (too adverb- and adjective-heavy), but I suspect for most it will be a respite from the inelegant prose we encounter regularly in our daily reading, especially online. Critics have noted Cossery’s prose has a Balzacian touch. This stylistic similarity is matched by the two French authors’ common view of society. Cossery adopts as a truism Balzac’s notion that behind every fortune is a crime.

As for the meaning of the book’s title, fear not: this is revealed two pages from the end.

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A shorter version of this review is posted on Amazon.