Discoveries

The Whole Story and Other Stories

Ali Smith

Anchor Books: 178 pp., $13 paper

"This actually happened to me," begins one story in this riveting, lyrical collection. "To be exact," the narrator protests in another. It's a three-ring circus: an almost clownish obsession with fact and perception in one, rich emotional performances in another and a Greek chorus of narrative voices that ricochet off the walls of various relationships in another. A woman sits in a secondhand bookshop that has had no customers in four days. A 1974 edition of "The Great Gatsby" is followed from owner to owner until it ends up in a performance piece. The life of another bookshop is chronicled through the eyes of its employees; in one episode, a man they name Toxic visits and insists that they carry his biography of Hitler. The woman who meets death on her way home: "He was handsome, balding, a middle-aged man in a suit so light-coloured it seemed contrite, and he was vaguely recognizable, vaguely arty, like a BBC executive from the days when TV still promised both decency and aesthetic ambition."

Ali Smith's writing is irreverent, old-fashioned and newfangled all at once. "The good people of the town are asleep in their beds. The bad people of the town are asleep in their beds. The tourists are asleep in their bed-and-breakfast beds.... Out down the empty loch road, and the monster deep asleep in the bed of the loch, the hills and the sky are beginning to appear again upside down in the water."

*

Mountain R: A Novel

Jacques Jouet

Translated from the French by Brian Evenson

Dalkey Archive: 144 pp., $12.95 paper

Do you ever wonder if you're too old for some books? Or too young? You put them away for another decade, just in case, like a wine with potential. "Mountain R" hits all the old Orwellian buttons: A ridiculous government decides to create a 1,500-meter-high monument, Mountain R, to commemorate its own greatness and to revive flagging political support. "We will all be energized by the multiplication of red blood cells," the speaker of the house tells the republic, "and thus the multiplication of ideas, and thus the multiplication of advanced and eminently exportable technologies!" Jacques Jouet, with the help of a vivacious translation, pokes timeless fun at the pomp and arrogance of politicians, the often symbolic irrelevance of government and the depressing reduction of history to anecdote. There's a hollow, cynical echo emanating from this French novel that makes Andre Malraux look cheerful.