Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas
Lawrence Weschler
(University of Chicago)

By some people's reckoning, ours has been the century of the refugee, a hundred years marked by the continual headlong flight of one multitude or another across borders and time zones, "changing countries more often than we changed our shoes," as Brecht has said. In this collection, Lawrence Weschler puts three political exiles under the magnifying lens of the New Yorker Profile—speaking with them at length over several years, triangulating them via interviews with their contemporaries, and dissecting the political and personal circumstances that have set them adrift.

Of course, the experiment is in certain ways slanted from the start. Despite Weschler's apparent range of choices (an Iraqi architect, a Czech student activist, and a South African poet), the three turn out to have quite a bit in common with each other—and with us, the targeted readers, as well. They're intelligent, cultured, highly European in background, and they tend to come from prominent families. What marks them is that, as Weschler says in his intro, they have done "the right thing . . . the thing you or I too might have done if only we were far more courageous . . ."

In short, as the title makes clear, they are exiles rather than refugees, heroic individuals rather than the faceless shapes clumped arteriosclerotically in transit camps. And perhaps precisely because of this individualistic streak, they have all ended up, in Weschler's term, "bollixed." He relates their stories in a lucid and sympathetic tone, but it is clearly the failures of these men—their breakdowns, short circuits, and misdirections—which draw him in.

Kanan Makiya risks his life to publish books like Republic of Fear, but succeeds mostly in alienating other Arab intellectuals. Jan Kavan spends 20 years smuggling literature into Czechoslovakia, only to be accused of collaborating with the secret police after he returns in 1990. Breyten Breytenbach, sent back on a senseless clandestine mission into his apartheid homeland, spends nearly a decade in prison while his brothers rise in the South African military and media worlds.

One wonders if political resistance would seem so quixotic if Weschler had chosen other test subjects—say, an Iraqi Kurd, a Czech Gypsy, or a black member of the ANC. While the stories don't encourage political apathy, they don't exactly exhort you to the barricades, either. Mostly, much like the protagonists themselves, the reader is left like a refugee in an ethical no-man's land, halfway between the comfort of one position and the promise of the other.

© Edward Batchelder
(from The Boston Phoenix)