Monday's Review Today: A Quirky Debut Novel & Henry Ford in the Amazon
-- Publishers Weekly, 4/30/2009 1:39:00 PM
In Jessica Anthony's "compulsively readable" first novel, The Convalescent, the author introduces us to a bizarre protagonist in Rovar Pfliegman, a mute, stout man who makes his living selling meat out of a bus. While Anthony makes literary nods to writers ranging from Kafka to Rushdie to Darwin, she sets herself apart with a style that is "funny, immediate and unapologetically cerebral." In NYU professor Greg Grandin's Fordlandia, the academic recounts how Henry Ford tried, from the early '20s through the mid '40s, to turn an area of Brazil into a rubber manufacturer and outpost of his automotive empire. The story offers Grandin "a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford," as well as "the follies of colonialisn."
The Convalescent
Jessica Anthony. McSweeney’s, $22 (272p) ISBN 978-1-934781-10-4
Anthony’s compulsively readable debut novel stars Rovar Pfliegman, who sells meat out of a bus in Virginia. Rovar is a peculiar, troll-like man: he is short and hairy, has not spoken since childhood, keeps a pet beetle and lives in the same broken-down bus that houses his meat business. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Rovar is his precarious singularity. He is the last of the Pfliegmans and, by his own account, he is falling apart. Although he halfheartedly seeks treatment for his various ailments, he seems far more bent on fulfilling the destiny of self-destruction all Pfliegmans (according to Rovar) are subject to. Rovar’s explanation of his family sprawls deep into the past, probing beyond his chaotic childhood all the way back to the origins of the Pfliegman clan in premedieval Hungary. Along the way, the narrative nods to all sorts of greats—Kafka, Rushdie, Darwin and Grass, to name a few. But Anthony’s style—funny, immediate and unapologetically cerebral—carves out a space all its own. (July)
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City
Greg Grandin. Metropolitan, $27.50 (432p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8236-4
Gandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford’s attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil’s Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Gandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon—where “7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles”—could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Gandin concludes that “Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism.” Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century. 54 b&w photos. (June)
