Eye Against Eye.(A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence)(Book review)

Forrest Gander. Eye Against Eye. New York: New Directions, 2005. 80 pp. $14.95

Forrest Gander. A Faithful Existence: reading, memory, and transcendence. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 149 pp. $24

What would it be like to pull the curtains aside and suddenly look out upon the world for the first time? To be, as Forrest Gander memorably calls it, torn awake? This is the driving question of Gander's two new books and of his work as a whole. As poet, reader, and translator, Gander dreams of "the incipient vision opening to us from the other side of…