Short takes
Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature
By Linda Lear
St. Martin's, 581 pp., illustrated, $30
Beatrix Potter's accepting nature is reflected in this cautious biography. Lear refuses to apply a shaping principle or supply an explanatory insight to her abundant store of material. Potter was not only the author and illustrator of many books for children (notably "Peter Rabbit") but also a potentially important naturalist, a canny businesswoman, an astute landowner and estate manager, a devoted and dutiful daughter.
Child of wealthy parents, Potter was educated at home, where her artistic talent was appreciated and encouraged. Rudely rebuffed by the scientific community because she was a woman and an amateur, she abandoned science for children's stories. Once her books became popular, she cleverly marketed Peter Rabbit dolls and games and carefully negotiated her numerous contracts. She remained single, constrained by her shy nature and her mother's social ambitions, until her 40s, when she finally and happily married her solicitor.
Lear notes that Potter wished to be different from her idle mother, but fails to account for her boundless energy and enterprise in several public arenas and her corresponding reticence in pursuit of her personal happiness.
Skylark Farm
By Antonia Arslan
Translated, from the Italian, by Geoffrey Brock
Knopf, 288 pp., $23.95
"The darkest day for a country is the one when, in order to feel united, it feels the need to eliminate a defenseless segment of its population." The destruction of minorities is an old, often-repeated story. Here it is told from the Armenian point of view in Turkey in 1915. Written as a novel based on history, the account reads like a tale handed down from one generation to the next, an explanatory family myth -- how the Arlsans came to live in Italy.
The family, revered and respected in its small city, was despised by the Young Turks, whose plan to reinvent Turkey included ridding the country of its "riffraff": Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Syrians. Brutally, they killed many Armenian men, driving the remaining women and children out of the country. The deportation of the women and children was, in fact, a death march south from Armenian Anatolia across the Taurus Mountains toward Aleppo, in northern Syria. Ruined, ragged, and starving, the strongest or the luckiest of the family managed to make it to a camp outside of Aleppo. Then, in a daring move, they escaped from the camp and eventually arrived in Venice.
While the story is yet another moving example of atrocities committed by one group upon another, it feels generic rather than specific. It lacks the details that make a novel live, substituting the sentiment and nostalgia that make a myth survive.
A Tale of Two Lions
By Roberto Ransom
Translated, from the Spanish, by Jasper Reid
Norton, 112 pp., $19.95
The two lions of the title may or may not be lions. Real or imagined, they perform nimbly through these brief tales. The first, Cattino, may perhaps be a large housecat. He is pampered by his besotted mistress, an Italian countess. When he travels with her to New York, he is misplaced or maybe purposely misdirected by the countess's jealous husband. After flying around the globe several times in the baggage compartment, he is repatriated to a circus. The second lion, named Pasha, may be alive or may be stuffed. First exhibited in a glass cage in a museum in Kenya, he too becomes an act at the Italian circus. Once inside the ring, he remains completely stiff and lifeless, leaving spectators awed. Cattino, when in the ring, transforms himself from cat to lion and back again. Then he adds the astonishing feat of human speech. The audience is amazed. The two shape-changing artists, who cannot be contained by the low theater of the circus, run away and disappear. Cattino's story is narrated by the jealous husband, Pasha's by the protective museum guard. Both are delightfully unreliable narrators well suited to the enigmatic stories they have to tell.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York. 
