The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Autodafe #1 by Christian Salmon, ed.
Brooke Horvath

Christian Salmon, ed. Autodafe #1. International Parliament of Writers. Seven Stories Press, 2001. 274 pp. Paper: $16.95.

The International Parliament of Writers was created in 1993 as a human rights organization intent on protecting writers while raising awareness of threats to free expression worldwide. Toward these ends the Parliament has established a network of “Cities of Asylum” (from Las Vegas to Göteborg) to provide lodging, stipends, and other assistance to persecuted writers. The new journal Autodafe is another way in which writers can, according to editor Christian Salmon, “intervene in public life” and “put forward an ethics of language, a politics of literature.” Beautifully produced if sometimes sloppily edited, the premiere issue of this biannual publication—each issue of which will be published in five languages—is uneven, its thirty-two selections (mostly essays but with a smattering of fiction, poetry, and drama) proving sometimes self-indulgently useless, sometimes portentously banal. Occasionally, a piece’s clarity and power falter because the cultural and political circumstances at issue are insufficiently contextualized. Nevertheless, it is difficult to complain about a journal that provides a forum for writers, many of whom will doubtless be unknown to most American readers, and the discussion of such consequential topics: Gao Er Tai on Chinese work camps; Rogelio Saunders Chile (Cuba) on totalitarianism’s intolerance of cultural difference; Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) on Mumia Abu-Jamal; Fernando Savater (Spain) on Basque ethnic cleansing. Often—as with Svetlana Alexievich’s investigation of love in Russia, Stanko Cerovic on the bombing of Belgrade, or Mehmed Uzun (Turkey) on the Kurdish experience of exile—the results are both informative and extremely moving. Indeed, Autodafe is to be applauded for dragging literature from the classroom and the pages of who-cares quarterlies into the streets and, by revealing what can happen to literature and its makers, giving the lie to the fear that literature, as Auden said of poetry, “makes nothing happen.” [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Autodafe #1 by Christian Salmon, ed. Brooke Horvath Christian Salmon, ed. Autodafe #1. International Parliament of Writers. Seven Stories Press, 2001. 274 pp. Paper: $16.95. The International Parliament of Writers was created in 1993 as a human rights organization intent on protecting writers while raising awareness of threats to free expression worldwide. Toward these ends the Parliament has established a network of “Cities of Asylum” (from Las Vegas to Göteborg) to provide lodging, stipends, and other assistance to persecuted writers. The new journal Autodafe is another way in which writers can, according to editor Christian Salmon, “intervene in public life” and “put forward an ethics of language, a politics of literature.” Beautifully produced if sometimes sloppily edited, the premiere issue of this biannual publication—each issue of which will be published in five languages—is uneven, its thirty-two selections (mostly essays but with a smattering of fiction, poetry, and drama) proving sometimes self-indulgently useless, sometimes portentously banal. Occasionally, a piece’s clarity and power falter because the cultural and political circumstances at issue are insufficiently contextualized. Nevertheless, it is difficult to complain about a journal that provides a forum for writers, many of whom will doubtless be unknown to most American readers, and the discussion of such consequential topics: Gao Er Tai on Chinese work camps; Rogelio Saunders Chile (Cuba) on totalitarianism’s intolerance of cultural difference; Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) on Mumia Abu-Jamal; Fernando Savater (Spain) on Basque ethnic cleansing. Often—as with Svetlana Alexievich’s investigation of love in Russia, Stanko Cerovic on the bombing of Belgrade, or Mehmed Uzun (Turkey) on the Kurdish experience of exile—the results are both informative and extremely moving. Indeed, Autodafe is to be applauded for dragging literature from the classroom and the pages of who-cares quarterlies into the streets and, by revealing what can happen to literature and its makers, giving the lie to the fear that literature, as Auden said of poetry, “makes nothing happen.” [Brooke Horvath]

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