-- Dana Goodyear

*Monkey Hunting

A Novel

Cristina Garcia

Alfred A. Knopf: 258 pp., $23

When writers are likened to jazz musicians, it's usually in admiration of a startling linguistic virtuosity or an unbridled imagination; it might be noted, for example, that a novelist possesses a pyrotechnic energy to match that of Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But Cristina Garcia's "Monkey Hunting" is much more like one of those haunting Miles Davis solos. Like the trumpeter, Garcia has a rare gift for concentrating beauty by leaving things out. Here is a miracle of poetic compression, a novel that manages to trace four generations of a family not by revealing every last detail of personal histories but rather by revealing people's dreams, their unuttered concerns and observations -- the things that strike them when they hear the hoot of an owl, or when they try on a pair of their great-grandfather's glasses in front of a mirror.

To inherit the sensibility of one's ancestors is to inherit a mirror that magically stores all of its reflections. Without treacle or trickery, "Monkey Hunting" follows one such mirror's long line of bequeathal, and in doing so presents us with characters we come to care about deeply. We don't follow them throughout their entire lives, and we don't need to get the true sense of who they are. With the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what can be left out, Garcia has made a small masterpiece -- an epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses.

-- Jeff Turrentine

*The Noonday Cemetery And Other Stories

Gustaw Herling

Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston

New Directions: 282 pp., $25.95

The narrator of these 13 beautifully crafted, mysterious, often unsettling stories is an elderly Polish writer living in Naples, Italy. Ailing and an insomniac, he spends his semi-retirement as a metaphysical sleuth piecing together accounts of ancient and modern acts of unspeakable evil, outbreaks of cruelty and self-destruction, downfalls of illustrious families and cases of moral debasement of seemingly stalwart characters. Though hardly enjoying those spectacles of desolation -- they sometimes make him physically sick -- he seems to be on a personal mission to record some of the devil's more imaginative exploits. The reason for this strange fascination, we are led to believe, is hidden somewhere in his own past. From scattered remarks we learn that he was a soldier in World War II, lived through a shattering personal tragedy and has intimate knowledge of the horrors of the 20th century. In those respects, the narrator is a literary double of the book's author, Gustaw Herling, one of the finest Polish memoirists and fiction writers, who died in 2000.