For poet and critic, small books are fodder for big thoughts Reviewed by Cynthia Haven   Sunday, December 22, 2002 Nonrequired Reading Prose Pieces By Wislawa Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh HARCOURT; 233 PAGES; $24 Every author hates it. Every reviewer is warned against it. The oldest stricture in the book is against critics' using the author's work as a springboard to discuss their own passions, pet peeves, quirks. Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska seems never to have heard of that gripe. In the Polish poet's "Nonrequired Reading," a collection of reviews written from 1968 to 2001, reviews go way around the block discussing philosophy, contemporary manners, archaeology, geology, whatever -- and sometimes almost parenthetically discuss the book to be critiqued. It's significant that Harcourt inserts the book title, author and publisher in small type, at the end of the review. For in the end, we get very little of the book but a great deal of Szymborska. We are lucky this is so. Most of her reviews in her long-standing column, also called "Nonrequired Reading," trumpet ultimately forgettable books. The thinking behind her column is simple: Literary and nonfiction heavy-hitters get reviewed copiously. "But things look different in the bookstore," where popular science and how-to books sell like hotcakes, she notes in her introduction. "Most (if not all) of the rapturously reviewed books lay gathering dust on the shelves for months before being sent off to be pulped, whereas all the many others, unappreciated, undiscussed, unrecommended, were selling out on the spot." Szymborska decided to review the latter. "Even the worst book can give us something to think about," she has written elsewhere, and she proceeds to prove that this is true. Her selections -- books on continental drift, the genealogy of the Cleopatras, Chinese languages and dialects ("To live in this world and know nothing about the Chinese alphabet makes no sense") or "nightlife" (no, not what you think, but rather about the nearly 3,000 mammals who do their hunting at night, along with nocturnal reptiles, amphibians, insects and birds) -- are characteristically idiosyncratic. For example, "Nonrequired Reading" includes one of the few reviews of Marcia Lewis' "The Private Lives of the Three Tenors." The author, you may recall, is Monica Lewinsky's mom, and, yes, incredible as it may seem, this book was translated into Polish. Szymborska pooh-poohs the lubricious rumors Lewis repeats: "The handsome young Domingo spent nearly twelve months in Tel Aviv, during which he made more than two hundred appearances and learned more than fifty roles by heart. If this grind ever permitted the occasional chink of free time, I doubt that busty supermodels bursting with silicone could slither into it." In a chapter titled "Page-Turners," Szymborska even reviews a wall calendar. Take this very typical passage on its humble fate: "The calendar is doomed to gradual liquidation as its pages are torn off. Millions of books will outlive us, and a considerable number will be ridiculous, dated, and badly written. The calendar is the only book that has no intention of outlasting us, that does not lay claim to a sinecure on the library shelves; it is programmatically short-lived. In its humility it does not even dream of being pored over page by page." More memorable than the critiqued books is the sly, witty, engaging voice that emerges from behind these backhanded reviews from perhaps history's most reclusive Nobel literary superstar. Szymborska makes her humane, commonsensical points but always comes at them slantwise. The observations on creatures that prowl and whir and twitter through the night quickly turn into observations of "nighttime as a wholesale slaughterhouse": "investigating the nature of Nature generally leads to unpalatable conclusions. . . . We humans also take our nourishment at the cost of others' lives: I consider this a scandal. The scandal is the greater since we must, willy-nilly, participate, which we often do with great relish." Not surprisingly, these whimsical prose pieces are all of a piece with her poems. What a short leap from these reviews to these lines in "Torture," written in 1986: Nothing has changed, Except maybe manners, ceremonies, dances. Yet the gesture of arms shielding the head Has remained the same. The body writhes, struggles, and tries to break free . . . When this same, fey outlook combines with urgent, historical circumstance, her lines ignite. "The Turn of the Century," the first poem she published two years after the declaration of martial law in December 1981, is a retrospective ode to the new century (both poems are from "Miracle Fair," published in paperback in November): God was at last to believe in man: good and strong. But good and strong Are still two different people. How to live, someone asked me in a letter, Someone I had wanted to ask the same thing. Again and as always And as seen above There are no questions more urgent Than the naive ones. The sobering dates on the "Nonrequired Reading" reviews are a reminder that this is one way Szymborska made her living after she left the Communist Party in 1967. Given the poets who languished and starved and died under similar regimes . . . well, she's to be congratulated for quiet wisdom. Most of these reviews are less than two pages. Dreadful to say this -- but somehow one suspects Szymborska would approve -- but it's the ideal length for the bathroom, for waiting "on hold" or for the long, long lines at the DMV. Cynthia Haven has written for San Francisco Magazine, Stanford Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.

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