[In the following review of An Artificial Wilderness, Hall praises Birkerts's "urgent, serious, energetic voice" for celebrating non-American writers and books.]

Sven Birkerts shakes us by the shoulders, telling us what to read and how to read it. He urges Robert Musil on us, comparing him to Nietzsche: "We find in both the same impatience, the same determination to stay in motion, and the understanding that the truth is itself a process, its seeker forever embattled. We turn to Musil because he never lies to us and because he never hides from the unsightly implications of a particular thought." In An Artificial Wilderness, his first book, Mr. Birkerts's urgent, serious, energetic voice ranges over the world of modern letters—with passionate intelligence discovering, praising and recommending books and writers: many German-language novelists. Marguerite Yourcenar, Malcolm Lowry, Cyril Connolly, V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott together, Borges, Walter Benjamin.

This critic is above all a reader, even a book lover, without the props of pipe and tweed that once characterized these roles. Just now he teaches composition at Harvard but he is not an academic; he has spent a third of his life—I take him for 35 or so—working in bookstores: "I chewed my sandwich with an open book in my lap." Another critical bookstore clerk was R. P. Blackmur, whom Mr. Birkerts quotes to define their art as "the formal discourse of an amateur."

An Artificial Wilderness collects essays written out of love for literature and concern over the condition of our culture. Mr. Birkerts is best when he is most ambitious, taking account of a great writer's vision and voice in conjunction with the history of our times. His awareness of "the brutalities of history," especially as observed by European writers, removes any suggestion of cozy connoisseurship from this critic's essays. Mr. Birkerts is meliorist only in respect to literature: as he demonstrates for us German, Russian, French and Italian authors, he says, "Transportation is civilization…. Every exchange across cultures between writer and reader betters our chances."

Which of course brings up difficulties inherent in this transportation. Correctly Mr. Birkerts mocks readers who pass up great writers because they refuse to read translations; but he seldom addresses himself to the losses.

We know that he is aware of the problem because he will talk about foreign poets only when they write prose. Two essays on Osip Mandelstam form the center of this book. Mr. Birkerts understands that it is "the very nature of lyric poetry that its idea inheres in the prosody, that you cannot detach it and lift it out in the way you might lift out the backbone from a well-cooked fish." Therefore he celebrates a poet by way of the poet's prose, without recourse to prosody or syntax, developing ideas from translated images, from abstractions, and from summaries—from a relentless assault that uses whatever seems transportable.

It is strange but effective, this homage to poetry and poet by way of prose. (Later he does something similar with Joseph Brodsky and Eugenio Montale.) As he enacts and embodies the great Mandelstam, martyred by Stalin, Mr. Birkerts continually rehearses literary embodiments of moral thought in circumstances of historical brutality. Mandelstam refused to lie to us and died of the refusal.

An Artificial Wilderness ranges from useful praise of European novelists and Russian poets to "Critics and Thinkers" like Erich Heller and Walter Benjamin. When he touches on contemporary American literature—"The School of Gordon Lish," "Docu-Fiction"—Mr. Birkerts celebrates less and criticizes more. Reading him, we celebrate the arrival of a new critic prepared to direct us and to argue with us.