The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 34

Paperbacks Hfi THE GUARDIAN Tuesday April 5 1994 Phil Baker Lupin seeds it4tetrf 'him of Italian writing stops at Calvino, Eco and Levi. A wide range of contemporary stories by Tondelli, Ce-lati, Rosetta Loy and so on, ably translated by Stuart Hood, Liz Heron and others. Tim Parks' translation of Tabucchi's "A Hunt" is, as usual, virtuoso. Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic French Fairy Tales, translated by Jack ZIpes (Meridian, C9.99) WELL-KNOWN in "Red Riding and less well-known tales with the "Princess by Perrault and his successors, from an age when folk-tales were being hauled out of the hamlets and turned into ponderous and rather unappealing tracts he married Beauty, who lived with him a long time in perfect happiness because their relationship was founded on There's one by Anne-Claude Philippe de Tubieres Grimoard de Pes-tels de Levis (1692-1765), who was apparently a chap. Rllke On Love And Other Difficulties, by Ralner Maria Rllke, Translations and Considerations by John Mood (Norton, C6.B5) A DEAD ringer for Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire, John Mood worships Rilke, and tells us so in a prologue, three introductions and an epilogue to this collection of interesting marginalia.

"Finally," he writes, "while recently rereading some of Rilke again (an almost constant activity of mine), the necessity became overpowering and I had to speak My own words seem partial. I have not found it possible to speak the deeper dimensions of my sense of Rilke, which is somehow very close to my own inmost biography and being." Wild stuff. Shaun Whiteside is a translator inrm. i Blue guitar in a violin shop Frank O'Hara Personal calls Dictionary of the Avanl-Gardes, by Richard Kostelanetz (a cappella books, C14.99) RICHARD Kostelanetz is best known for works like Tabula Rasa (1978), a novel of 1,000 blank pages, and for his attacks on the cliquey fixers who conspire to prevent work like his from reaching the wider audience it deserves. To this end he has edited Assemblings, a book-length periodical of otherwise unpub-lishable material.

He now has over 100 books to his credit, the latest of which is this Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Anyone who wants to know more about Kostelanetz can turn to his entry on himself, but he figures in other entries too, such as Polyartist honorific, coined back in 1969 and occasionally used by Maximal Art coinage, which I'd be the first to admit has scarcely and Gender contrast to my publisher, usually a smart guy, I think gender one of many current categories that don't really belong in this Not that this is a self-centred book: far from it. It is enormously generous and enthusiastic, but with no pretence of objectivity. It is interesting to see who's included. Performance artist Karen Finley is in, for example, but Kathy Acker is not.

Not that anyone will miss her, when they can read about Al Crowder or Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness sauntered around New York during the first world war, wearing a modest pair of tomato tins and a wrist-to-shoulder display of celluloid curtain rings, while Al Crowder invented the firm of Or-ville Snav Associates. This manufactured "small pieces of machinery distributed with arcane and ridiculous instructions and the most celebrated of which was produced in an edition of 40,000 and consisted of two pieces of wire in a box. Customers who returned the warranty card would receive a long rambling letter about Or-ville Snav's personal problems. In short, Kostelanetz's marvellous dictionary goes well beyond the "classic" avant-garde of Gertrude Stein and John Cage.

Entries can be surprising (Northrop as well as opinionated and shrewd. On the inadvertent function of Jenny Holzer's monumentally banal slogan-works, for example, he writes that "every profession needs an idiot-identifier, if it is to remain a a cappella books are distributed by Turnaround, 27 Horsell Road, London N5 1XL NEW AUTHORS PUBLISH YOUR WORK ALL SUBJECTS CONSIDERED Fiction, Non-Fiction, Brogrephy, RellQloui Poetry, Children's AUTHORS WORLD-WIDE INVITED Write or tend your mintscript to MINERVA PRESS 2 OLD BH0MPT0W RD, LONDON SW7 3PQ Do you have a Manuscript? Does it deserve Publication? The largest Joint-venture publisher in the U.K. welcomes work on all subjects fir free appraisal: The Adclphl Press (On A66) 4-6 Effia Road FuDurs London SW6 1TD Shaun Whiteside The Desert of Love, by Francois Mau rifle, translated by Gerard Hopkins (Penguin, C3.8S) NABOKOV suggested that translations should read like translations, and Gerard Hopkins makes some concessions to the principle in his 1949 version of Mauriac's glum little melodrama must be mad!" "Yes, I too, I Boy falls for father's mistress, the symbolically named Maria Cross. Everybody fails to communicate and nobody is redeemed. Implausibly, the novel contains a character called Fred, and another one called Gladys.

Jean Santeull, by Marcel Proust translated by Gerard Hopkins (Penguin, C9.99) GERARD Hopkins on much better form, but not Proust at his finest. An early, condensed-book version of A la recherche, as retold by a narrator very like Mr Pooter's son, Lupin. Wee Jean has to have his hot water bottle at exactly the right temperature, and gets into a neurasthenic tizz when his mum doesn't give him a bedtime kiss. Proust wanted to throw this book away, but it's a moderately engaging introduction to the big one. The Quality of Light Modern Italian Short Stories, edited by Ann and Michael Caesar (Serpent's Tan, 8.99) THEY read our books, as anyone who's stepped into an Italian bookshop will know, so isn't it about time we took a closer look at theirs? This collection will be a treat for anyone whose knowledge Nicholas Lezard Delusions of Grandeur, by John Rae (HarperCollins, 60.99) ALTHOUGH one's interest in the memoirs of an ex-headmaster of a central London private school should be vanishingly small, Dr Rae (whose pupils used to have to watch TV and read the Times to find out what he had to say) gives an amusing and reasonably candid view of his time there, and elsewhere.

If there is a case for private education, it's in here somewhere; but the converse is true as well. "I would have sold a place at Westminster if the price was high enough, but it never was." Do not be fooled by the title. The Japanese: Strange but not Strangers, by Joe Joseph (Penguin, C6.S9) FUNNY, but hot in the Bryson Law-son way I'm just stopping over for a couple of weeks to make a few amusing remarks about you, then I'll be out of your Joseph was the Times' Tokyo correspondent. The measure of his success is that he also makes Western culture look bizarre in comparison. Worth buying even if you're not heading that way.

Poems for all Purposes: the Selected Poems of Chesterton, edited and Introduced by Stephen Medcalf (Pimlico, CIO) AH, if only Chesterton wasn't right-wing, anti-Semitic, a Catholic con- time.) For unlike say Pollock's, O'Hara's attempt at radical difference only emphasises his deep connection with the orality and free lines of the American poetic tradition that passes through Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and in their way, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. As in Williams and Whitman, O'Hara's poems are in a state of permanent manifesto; they are on a militant footing, always advertising the importance of their novelty. Each poem is like a dare, a wager. O'Hara, in other words, didn't need to invent It already existed, deep in the American tradition. But his poems are also remarkable for the uses they make of the American prose inheritance (not for nothing does he joke in "Why I am not a "It is even in prose, I am a real The sensory overload, the rush of urban detail, the congested consciousness all this was there for the taking, as O'Hara surely knew, in the prose of Stephen Crane or Henry Roth.

"It's my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty ghening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on." This book is full of fabulously electric, slightly campy, slightly surreal lines: "Ah! to be at vespers with Mediterranean And there is so much wit "Wet heat drifts through the afternoon like a campus dog." At his best, his tiniest splinters are exquisite and touching. Here, in full, is "The cannot possibly think of you other than you are: the assassin of my orchards. You lurk there in the shadows, meting out conversation like Eve's first confusion between penises and snakes. Oh be droll, be jolly and be temperate! Do not frighten me more than you have to! I must live forever.

James Wood is the Guardian's chief literary critic James Wood Selected Poems, by Frank O'Hara, edited by Donald Allen (Penguin, C8.S9) LOVE and welcome, Frank O' Hara! is a suitably O'Hara-ish way to celebrate this great eccentric American poet's first appearance here in paperback. Searching for the occasional O'Hara edition in this country used to be like searching for a blue guitar in a violin shop. No longer. This handsome Penguin selection lets us savour this wonderfully vivacious, witty, free poet and his ravishing discontinuities. His poems are like strips of life, torn off so fast that all the seams and serrations show: "The ivy is trembling in the hammock and the air is a brilliant pink to which straddling brilliantly the hummock, cry 'It is today, I In a marvellously funny mock-manifesto in 1959, O'Hara called this directness he likened it to telephoning the reader: "The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Robbe-Grillet did." O'Hara's like much of his poetry, is a calculated strike against "literariness," especially conventional Yeatsian high-flown rhetoric resporisibUiues did not begin in dreams, though they began in bed A locomotive is more melodious than a His oeuvre might be called 'Thirteen ways to tease Wallace This superficial avant-gardism seems to me the only obvious link he has with painters like Pollock and de Kooning. (O'Hara, who died at the age of 40 in 1966, edited Art News for a vert Actually, this collection does put these things into context, and if some of his poems are so rumty- tumty that you can imagine the modem movement being formed spontaneously as a reaction, he has his Kiplingesque moments. He is at his best when he writes as he does often about drinking, and how good it is. Good Reading Guide, by Kenneth McLeish (Bloomsbury, C4.99) THE book's riff goes as follows: you look up author (all tastes and intelligences undiscriminatingly catered for). McLeish gives you a rough idea of what author is about He then gives you sometimes surreal suggestions for further reading.

Eg, If you like Gore Vidal, why don't you try Muriel Spark? "One good book leads to another," runs the subtitle. How true, how true. I suppose McLeish is making an effort, but if you need his help it might already be too late. Herotlca 2: a Collection of Women's Erotic Fiction, odlted by Susie Bright and Joan Blank (Plumo, 6.99) JUST as when I wander into the ladies' bogs by mistake, two tilings strike me as a man on looking at this book: one, I shouldn't be here, and two, isn't it clean! Strange to read erotica which does not end with the slippery humiliations of male-oriented pom, although the formula and trajectory of the writing are constants in both universes. It may not be art, but it's all good fun, and the prose is up to scratch..