A difficult masterpiece? We don't think so

Nor do I want to be a snob about publishing houses. Someone who was might surmise that if a writer has a novel, as opposed to a scholarly work, published by an academic publisher he must have failed to find a commercial outlet for his labors. But Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was first published by an obscure Paris

specialist in erotica, and Ulysses itself first issued by one of Joyce's friends through her bookshop, again in Paris. Both books went on to become international classics. And just last month Duke University Press came up with a stunning history of New York's 1970s disco culture, Tim Lawrence's Love Saves The Day. Can it be, then, that the University of Nebraska has a winner hidden away in its stable?

Personally, I doubt it. In 1926, Ezra Pound wrote to Joyce, after receiving a section of his famously obscure Finnegans Wake, "Doubtless there are patient souls who will wade through anything for the sake of the possible joke." Will readers be willing to wade through Hisoshima Bugi? And is there a joke to reward them at the end of their labors? If there is, I didn't manage to find it.

The book does get more lucid toward the end, but only in the sense that it contains increasingly more frequent pieces of potted history, so that the pleasure it affords is like the dubious one of reading through an encyclopedia. Computers make this sort of work attractive to write as material can be keyed in as it comes to hand and then sorted out into sections closer to publication. But it isn't the way compelling imaginative masterpieces are constructed.

Gerald Vizenor is a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Berkley, and the author of 20 books, so one doesn't want to put him down as not being up to the mark. Instead, what this book suffers from is probably a misconceived original scheme.

Something more plot-driven, less formally organized, would, you feel, have stood a better chance of catching fire imaginatively. As it is, it's impossible to relax with it. You keep worrying that there's some grand scheme you haven't managed to grasp, some overwhelming question you can't quite get into focus. But, should you attempt this book and find this is your reaction, don't worry. At least you have this reviewer for company.