SOURCE: “Among the Casualties,” in American Book Review, Vol. 12, No. 6, 1991, pp. 16, 19.

In the following review of 99: The New Meaning, Metcalf discusses the importance of displacement and detachment in Abish's work.

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his time shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so willful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. … Above his will and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

On May 31, 1970, an earthquake and avalanche struck Peru, devastating a 125-mile-long valley between two Andean ranges, the Cordillera Negra and...