DISCOVERIES

Saffie is 20 when she goes to work for Raphael, a musician living in Paris in the 1950s. She is German, a human time bomb, her childhood memories roiling undigested inside of her implacable, immovable exterior. Raphael falls helplessly in love, mostly with her unreachableness. She marries him without changing her expression. They have a son, though Saffie does not want to, and the memories move closer to the surface. When she meets Andras, the Hungarian Jewish instrument maker, the bomb explodes inside her. She falls in love and confides in him, telling him about the Russian soldier who raped her and her mother when she was 8 and about her mother who killed herself soon after. They are lovers for six years. Andras tells her about all four of his grandparents and their 13 children and grandchildren, killed by Nazis. He is frightened and angry to learn that her father was a Nazi. The narrator of “The Mark of an Angel” stops point blank in several places to comment on the passing of time or to express sympathy for the characters. “Poor soul,” she says of Raphael when he first sends Saffie off to get his flute fixed by Andras. “What each loves in the other,” writes Nancy Huston in this novel of lovers, “is the enemy.” *

WHERE THE ROOTS REACH FOR WATER A Personal & Natural History; of Melancholia By Jeffrey Smith North Point Press: 298 pp., $24

One in fives cases of depression in the United States ends in suicide, Jeffrey Smith writes, more than once in this description of his own depression and his efforts to understand and live with it. When “Where the Roots Reach for Water” opens, he is working as a psychiatric case manager in Missoula, Mont., riding a variety of antidepressants like a roller coaster and contemplating suicide. After years of running from his melancholy, he turns to face it and, sure enough, it builds like a tsunami before him, drawing itself up to its full height. Deeply connected to nature and dependent on wilderness for the little peace and inspiration he is able to find in his life, Smith likens his depression to a kind of thirst, his attempts at happiness as roots reaching under the earth. “The shape of the root is where diversities draw together and make something new,” he writes, “all this life begins in one place: beneath the earth.” One source of Smith’s sadness is his memory of his childhood home in Ohio in the ‘60s, a rural home ruined by pile drivers and developers and chemical plants. Others are perhaps his father’s distance and his mother’s unhappiness. Or, as his grandmother tells him, it’s simply “in the blood.” In the end, he is unconquered but respectful in awe of the enemy.

THE PEKING LETTER A Novel By Seymour Topping; Public Affairs: 300 pp., $25)

Seymour Topping covered the Chinese Civil War and the French Indochina War before going to the New York Times as foreign editor and managing editor in 1959. All that allegiance to fact and withheld point of view would build up a novel in any journalist still attached to his own heartstrings, and it certainly did in Topping. “The Peking Letter,” full of urgency and passion and curiosity about Chinese history and culture, particularly Taoism, is written with a journalist’s even hand and careful attention to the movement of the story. Eric Jensen is in Peking in the late 1940s studying Lao Tsu. He’s a sergeant in the army when the CIA approaches him with an ultimatum: Help it by spying on the communist students or be accused of fraud for his traffic in Chinese artifacts. He accepts reluctantly, all the while dreaming of living in a Chinese house surrounded by gardens and art, studying the Tao with an elegant Chinese wife. The novel builds to the battle between Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, the increasingly intrusive backdrop to Jensen’s love affair with a Chinese medical student activist. Topping’s intimate relationship with China gives the novel its life, more so even than the racy plot.

THE EMPEROR’S EMBRACE Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson; Simon & Schuster: 192 pp., $24

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is our boldest speculator. He feels few qualms treading on scientists’ hollowed turf, be it psychiatry or animal behavior or biology or anthropology. He gets curious; he gets a notion. He explores a topic; he writes about it. Charles Darwin, he claims, is his hero. “He was never afraid of direct observation and if what he found did not correspond to current prejudices, so much the worse for the prejudices.” In “The Emperor’s Embrace” he ruminates on fatherhood, his own (Masson has a 20-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son) and the fathering techniques of various species, from emperor penguins to frogs. He writes about male brooding, males protecting their young, infanticide and cuckoldry. He speculates that domesticated animals lose many of their parenting skills and whether this is what has happened to human self-domesticated fathers. He hops from sea horses to whales to wolves and bears and ducks, making leaps and connections. “I can’t help wondering,” he covers for absentee elephant fathers, “whether some of this absence is not imposed on the male by a wary female.” There’s nothing like a good essayist to loosen the grip with which science holds so jealously to truth.