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Death of a River Guide, by Richard Flanagan (Grove Press, $24). In this remarkable homage to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Aljaz Cosini is a middle-aged
rafting guide for ecotourists—gone to seed after the death of his two-month-old daughter—who finds himself trapped beneath a waterfall on Tasmania's Franklin River. As he drowns, his life and the lives of his family and forebears flash before his eyes, his face "endlessly washed and scrubbed by this tide of the past." One of Australia's most
acclaimed young writers after the appearance of his first novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Flanagan possesses a wicked ear for the insincerities and parasitism that bedevil the relationship between guide and guided; Cosini's contempt for his "punters" (clients) and the self-loathing it entails lead to his fatal plunge.
Flanagan's gift for magical realism and Cosini's elegiac visions—encompassing his logger-trapper father, his Slovenian mother, and the long-repressed skeletons in the family closet (British convicts and Aboriginal folk whose blood will out)—elevate the narrative, while Tasmania's sad history is revealed through a series of bizarre anecdotes and
images: Cosini's immigrant ancestors sell their teeth to the rich to pay their debts; his father lays on elaborate barbeques, attended by possums and wombats, for his wife's ghost; a blackwood tree grows up through an abandoned railroad car in the forest, carring it aloft. By the time Cosini comes to the end of his harrowing tale, buzzed by news helicopters and
mocked by search-and-rescue men discussing the removal of his body, he has more than earned his final epiphany, "the thought that death is nowhere as violent as life." —Caroline Fraser
The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, by Travis Hugh Culley (Villard, $20). "I am a bike messenger," writes Travis Hugh Culley, "a lackey, a laborer, a punk-ass kid who calls this place
his home."The place is Chicago, and this memoir is a rousing cycling manifesto and an exuberant paean to the Windy City. An aspiring playwright, Culley instead found immortality in his day job as Service First courier number 39, delivering upwards of 70 packages per shift. His memoir takes us deep into the messenger culture of the 1990s, where couriers "skitch"
rides by latching onto passing cars, "bum-rush" security desks, and practice home wound stitchery after getting "doored" by exiting taxi passengers. Culley's customized Cannondale isn't a machine; it's an extension of his own body--"All the parts work as a single organism"--and the courier-cum-author ably conveys the adrenaline rush known only to those who've
braved the urban rush-hour wilderness on two wheels: "'How can all this fit into my eyes!' I wondered to myself, half amazed, half sick from the visual intoxication." Culley's readers will forgive such chunks of drama-major overwriting in exchange for a glimpse into this proud, manic, grotty world.--Bruce Barcott
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Reproduction of material from any pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
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