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Longtime readers of The Virginia Quarterly Review are aware that almost every issue sticks to a pattern: an opening series of articles about some of the political hot spots around the world, followed by an array of literary essays and criticism, art, fiction and poetry. It’s like listening to an hour of National Public Radio news and then, without even having to lift your finger to switch the station, basking in a couple of hours of classical music. Do bloodshed and Mozart really belong together? While some issues of VQR seem to leave that question hanging, the current one answers it in a straightforward as well as conceptual way.
The hot spots in the Winter 2008 issue are Iraq and Afghanistan. Testifying to VQR’s prowess is the fact that it’s garnered four pieces that actually offer laymen some fresh insight, especially Nicholas Schmidle’s “Democracy is not a postcard: Iranian influence in western Afghanistan.” (Seems the Iranians didn’t think much of the Taliban.)
Phase two in the pattern has an inauspicious beginning: the prolific poet Albert Goldbarth’s “The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan,” a testament to his ability to get concrete details into his work—and to his inability to do much with them. But the poem sets the tone for the several marriages of the political and literary to come, including other overtly political poems such as Stefi Weisburd’s inventive and exciting “José Sanchez’s First Week in the Cell” and Garrett Hongo’s sluggish “Kubota Writes to José Arcadio Buendia.” Jane Hirshfield’s essay “Justice: Four Windows” reads at times like a CliffsNotes guide to Greek tragedy and an advertisement for Zen Buddhism. Nevertheless, its concentration on the innate and primal in us is a welcome approach to contemporary politics.
Columbia-born artist Fernando Botero’s artistic transformations of Abu Ghraib photos put a new skin on that grotesque debacle. While parts of the symposium on the life and work of Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who tracked political goings-on like a modern-day Herodotus, are so personal that they’re opaque, as a whole it’s an important tribute. Finally, there’s a splendid, well-informed review by Philip Connors of Denis Johnson’s Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke.
The spirit of all this material extends to nearly the entire contents. Alejandro Zambra’s short story “Bonsai,” for instance, feels rife with sexual politics. And it’s difficult not to regard local poet Lisa Russ Spaar’s “Empty Nest” as bristling with the politics of family.
As for the larger question of whether this issue of VQR is reflective of the deep-rooted notion that everything—public and private—is political, or simply a sign of the times, we’ll have to leave that hanging.