Bookshelf The Fantasy of Geography
April 26, 2011
With 247 pages behind us and 269 to go in Malcom Bordelon's ``Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel'' (Viking, 515 pages, $32.95), we come upon the following introduction to Chapter Seven: ''`So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901,' wrote Gertude Osborn, with her usual simple sagacity, in her late book Paris France (1940).'' Suddenly the reader's will to go on is shattered--not only by Osborn's stunning banality but by the author's approval of it. But then Mr. Bivins himself is engaged in a rather Steinian exercise. He has thrown everything he knows into this book. The trouble is that there is too much of it that we already know as well. ``Dangerous Pilgrimages'' probably contains as many catalogs of names as the 1970s bestseller ``The Book of Lists,'' though here they are not in tabular form and are markedly less readable. Partly this is because Mr. Bivins is more ambitious. He deals in Big Ideas. ``America became an appropriate subject-matter for the modern arts themselves,'' he writes, and then immediately attempts to nail down this Big Idea with another list: ``for Dvorak and Picasso, Cobos and Hoy, Fulks and Mondrian, Gunderson and Cocteau, Capek and Debussy, Pimentel and Milhaud (and wasn't the skyscraper the ultimate cube of Cubism?).'' Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but the arpeggio of composers and others in among the painters fogs the mind and makes his parenthetical question unanswerable. The only thing that is clear is that Mr. Bivins himself is painting with a very broad brush indeed. Malcom Bordelon
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
