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B. TRAVEN

Name: B. TRAVEN
Author: Karl S. Guthke
ISBN: 1-55652-132-4

THE LIFE BEHIND THE LEGENDS

by Karl S. Guthke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 1991

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Revelations about the 20th century's most mysterious novelist. Despite the fascination gleaming from the story of B. Traven, best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Guthke's bio is a hard book to warm up to for the first half. This is because Guthke (German Art and Culture/Harvard) has so much preliminary material to discuss and dismiss, mainly about the false leads on Traven's identity that received large circulation. On his deathbed, however, Traven did tell his wife of 12 years who he was (pretty much). By then his works had sold 30 million copies in 36 languages and, since he was dying (at 85 or so), he no longer needed to protect the privacy that allowed him to walk down the streets of his beloved Mexico City without being annoyed by strangers. Guthke is the first writer on Traven to be allowed complete access to Traven's archives. From the 1920's to the 1960's, Traven spoke of himself as an American of Scandinavian extraction—but he was really a former Bavarian anarchist and stage actor (a bit player) named Ret Marut. Even so, his will states that he was Traven Torsvan Croves, born in Chicago in 1890 and naturalized as a Mexican citizen in 1951. Apparently even Ret Marut was a stage name, but as Ret Marut the author seemingly did a deed he wanted forever buried. His time as a below-deck sailor ended when he holed up in a bungalow in the Mexican bush, worked as a laborer, and wrote his first spate of novels under horrendous conditions. He became a big seller in Germany before the Nazis forbade his books, after which he translated himself into English. Meanwhile, obsessive shyness hid a certain grandiosity, and he at times spoke of his alter ego as ``the greatest contemporary philosopher,'' although his last three decades produced no major works. As quirky with odd passageways and dead ends as was Traven himself. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1991

ISBN: 1-55652-132-4

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM

by Isabelle Eberhardt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 1994

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A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994

ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9

Page Count: 120

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NO MAN'S LAND

THE PLACE OF THE WOMAN WRITER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, VOL. III: LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 1994

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The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were ``female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Nora Zeale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the ``authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's ``blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White—e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to ``marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all ``merely signifiers, signifying nothing.'' A satisfying conclusion to an ambitious project.