The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 1993

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 1993

Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Vollmann's newest book is, like The Rainbow Stories, a linked collection of novellas and stories, and like his earlier book is peopled mostly by the demimonde of San Francisco, with a few set in Third World locales. "These stories are all...

Correspondence.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Cool as a sheet of aluniinum on a winter day, British writer Sue Thomas's first novel is a highly original, highly complex, and highly cerebral self-reflexive piece of science fiction that fuses and confuses four different zones of reality: (1)...

Maya.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This novel opens with a double definition of its title as signifying the Yucatan race and a female personification of illusion and these two meanings help to set its parameters. Maya is constructed as a series of cinematic scenes narrated in...

Tornado Pratt.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Once the reader gets past our hero's logorrhea (deliberate, one assumes, on the author's part in order to create a nonstop deathbed monologue to rival any other in recent memory; Robert Browning's Bishop, ordering his tomb from his deathbed,...

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship.
June 22, 1993... Recently Baltimore Sun reporter Richard Sia described the beating a Western photographer narrowly escaped somewhere near Afgoi, Somalia, after using as a bathroom a building that was "either a place of worship or the site where the local clan...

Kalifornia.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... My most bewildering day in years was the one on which I picked up a copy of Time (9 February 1993) and saw that the cover story was about, I kid you not, cyberpunk. Cyberpunk? VIRTUAL SEX, SMART DRUGS AND SYNTHETIC ROCK' N' ROLL, big yellow...

In the Form of a Person.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This brilliant collection of stories introduces a writer who pursues the shocking visitations of madness in genteel society. (The stories remind me of Henry James's ghost stories.) The title alerts us to the underlying unity of the collection....

Moscow to the End of the Line.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Russia/the USSR produced as many or more excellent modernist writers from 1890 to 1935 as any nation in the world, but since Stalin's purges experimental writing has been discouraged to such an extent that it has become a literary backwater....

Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Jacket copy reveals Doubleday's amusing attempts to buffer this accomplished first novel for its American market: "Evocative of How to Make an American Quilt in structure... and Heartburn in its irony and wit, it is a lively and funny tale of...

Our Plague: A Film from New York.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... If aids is the metaphor for our sexual and political times, then the movies make for a political arena in which we confront the danger of sex and witness the demise of our psychological well-being in the nineties. In James Chapman's new fiction...

She Has Reddish Hair and Her Name is Sabina.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Hispanicists have known and written about Mexican novelist and critic Julieta Campos for years, but the lack of English translations of her work has prevented her from becoming more widely known. That should change now that two of her novels...

Russian Beauty.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... For some time now Victor Erofeyev (born 1946) has been identified as a dissident author; he co-edited and contributed three works to the 1979 Metropol anthology, which was banned by the Soviet government but smuggled out of the country and...

Asphodel.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Grubby manuscripts implicitly begging us to rethink Modernism are making it into print at an amazing rate these days. The latest diamond-in-the-rough to fly out of its box in the Beinecke Library is H.D.'s Asphodel, a roman a clef drafted in...

Dust on Her Tongue.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Although these stories are probably uncanny in their original Spanish, they are excellent examples of the translations of Bowles. When we read his various translations - of The Lemon or The Beggar's Knife - we seem to regard them as his works....

The Arimaspian Spy.
June 22, 1993... David Lynn Hall's novel is published by an academic press, and readers of its advertising copy may be led to expect a rather arid novel of ideas. They should be assured that it's nothing of the sort. The Arimaspian Eye is indeed by and about a...

The Harry and Sylvia Stories.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Each of Welch Everman's thirteen short stories presents a different side of relationships in the modern milieu. Although the stories can be read separately, the text is unified by the recurring presence in each story of characters named Harry...

Modernities and Other Writings.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In certain respects this may be the finest, most evocative volume of prose that Cendrars has written, though it consists mostly of nonfiction works. Some of the pieces were written in 1917 and collected in 1931 into a volume called Aujourd'hui....

The Porcupine.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... The jury is still out, one might think, on the subject of whether a good defense is the best offense or whether a good offense is the best defense. I suppose it depends on whether we're talking about porcupines, football, boxing, or possibly...

An Occasion of Sin.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Nine of the eleven short stories contained in this volume originally appeared in John Montague's only collection of short fiction, Death of a Chieftain and Other Stories, which was published in 1964. Of the two remaining stories: one appeared...

Surviving: The Uncollected Writings.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Henry Green remains an enigmatic writer. He cannot be "caught" - to use the title of one of his nine novels - because he refuses to rest. He forces us to question our usual assumptions about reality and/or fiction. Even his name is a mystery....

Under the Light.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Unfortunately overlooked, Michel's first collection of fifteen stories is impressive not only for the quality of his stories but for the range of styles he uses. From lyrical ("Willows") to toneless ("The Beast, Watered"), the stories are...

Dream Messenger.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... At age three, Masao Fudo was stolen from his mother by his father, who then promptly died. Masao winds up - reborn as Matthew Katagiri - in a New York City orphanage in the business of renting its charges (by the day, week, or longer) to people...

Caesar Antichrist.
June 22, 1993... When the major modernist writers are listed, Alfred Jarry is often excluded, forgotten about, and yet what a tremendous impact on modernism he had. Dadaism, surrealism, and absurdism were all derived from his work. In addition to this, much of...

Days and Nights.
June 22, 1993... When the major modernist writers are listed, Alfred Jarry is often excluded, forgotten about, and yet what a tremendous impact on modernism he had. Dadaism, surrealism, and absurdism were all derived from his work. In addition to this, much of...

Hitchhiking: Twelve German Tales.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Wayne Kvam is to be congratulated on his excellent translation of this collection of stories by a young writer from the former German Democratic Republic. Kvam renders Eckart's concise and very colloquial prose into equivalently conversational...

The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... In one of the three interviews contained in the third and final section of this book, Auster says that "having to write prose for publication disciplined me, I think, and convinced me that ultimately I was able to write prose. So in some sense...

Dring.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... French author Gailly's fourth novel, Dring is, after his second novel K.622, his best. Like Austrian author Thomas Bernhard and American author Gordon Lish, Gailly is interested in using repetition of syntax and vocabulary to transform...

Paterson, rev. ed.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Christopher MacGowan's scrupulously edited edition of Paterson supersedes all earlier editions of Williams's poem. Although minor textual changes may possibly be made in subsequent printings, this text is definitive. The enormous difficulties...

Shopping in Space: Essays on American 'Blank Generation' Fiction.
June 22, 1993... Although Shopping in Space studies recent American fiction, readers will find no mention of the writers featured in this issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction or of many others (from Don DeLillo to Richard Powers) whose work might seem...

Incest: From 'A Journal of Love.' The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1932-1934.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... Incest is not all of Nin's diary from these years, only the parts that baldly pertain to love or sex. Volume one of The Diary of Anais Nin covers the same Lime period without mentioning her husband or the carnal nature of other relationships....

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... This is one of the most extraordinary novels ever written. It's a torch song of a book, an operatic lament written in an intense, overwrought style that is by turns biblical, poetic, and impertinent. The story is simple: a young woman falls...

Postmodernism: A Reader.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... "There is hardly a single field of intellectual endeavor which has not been touched by the spectre of |the postmodern,'" announces Thomas Docherty in his introduction to this formidable collection, whose contents appropriately range freely...

A Balthus Notebook.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... I recognize that the notion of genre is limited and convenient. Surely the two books I am reviewing - both are from a series of "writers on art" - cannot be easily defined. They are art criticism, but at the same time they are representative...

Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... I recognize that the notion of genre is limited and convenient. Surely the two books I am reviewing - both are from a series of "writers on art" - cannot be easily defined. They are art criticism, but at the same time they are representative...

American Energies: Essays on Fiction.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... American Energies contains reviews of forty individual American novelists, almost all still alive, all active in the post-WWII years. The collection consists largely of occasional pieces and reviews published previously in various periodicals,...

Thomas Pynchon.
June 22, 1993... Judith Chambers's Pynchon has two noteworthy characteristics. In a book that surveys the author's entire corpus, she nonetheless achieves depth of analysis by pitching her discussion at what she takes to be the fundamental problematic of...

An interview with William T. Vollmann. (Interview)
June 22, 1993... Larry McCaffery: In one of your biographical statements, you emphasize your absorption as a kid in books - this sense of riding on the magic carpet with the caliph, and so on. Did inhabiting these exotic places so long and so deeply in your...

Something to die for. (novels versus television)
June 22, 1993... This time the Cassandras who talk about the death of the novel may be right, because the great enemy, television, is working to bring about the death of the book. Television is ideal for people without memories. As an instrument of control it...

The Rifles. (excerpt)
June 22, 1993... On trips either with the natives or without them we acclimatized more and more to a certain level of comfort, in terms of food and sleeping arrangements, and by late September we were eating raw meat quite often. In the evening (7:20), the...

Where an author might be standing. (on William T. Vollmann)
June 22, 1993... In the keystone novella to his first book of stories, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," David Foster Wallace voices a longing "to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die....

Suicide notes on William T. Vollmann's 'You Bright and Risen Angels.'
June 22, 1993... (But not I, not I....) When and where I grew up, before the main picture at a Saturday matinee, they always played an insect cartoon. This presumably was meant to appease the insects in the audience, chaperoned and otherwise, for whom no...

Arctic revelations: Vollmann's 'Rifles' and the frozen landscape of the self.
June 22, 1993... Towards the beginning of The Rifles, the third volume of his visionary Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann - or perhaps more accurately, the textual "Vollmann" (aka John, John Franklin, Captain Subzero, William the Blind, "he," "you," and...

Notes towards four meditations on W.T. Vollmann.
June 22, 1993... 1. The infant/enfances - to find out where he comes from, talking so high and hard, as he does. Research here for you, schoolmen. 2. Dawn of murder - does he want to turn murder, which is just a common American bad habit, into some...

The books as apparatus: William Vollmann's special editions.
June 22, 1993... Having published four books with four publishers in less than a year, William Vollmann is attracting attention. People are understandably fascinated by gargantuan feats of writing (and research - in the past year, he has made trips to the North...

An interview with Susan Daitch. (Interview)
June 22, 1993... Larry McCaffery: What sort of writing have you been doing recently? In an interview a while back you mentioned you were working on a series of interrelated novellas... Susan Daitch: I've put those aside and have been working on a novel...

From 'Eye of the Moon': train-eating sun blinded by eclipse. (excerpt)
June 22, 1993... On the television screen children in shorts and T-shirts stuck their heads into pillories while a voice-over described colonial forms of criminal punishment. Men wearing wigs pounded anvils, and women, also in wigs, smiled back at them. A...

Uncertain physiognomies: Susan Daitch's 'L.C.'
June 22, 1993... "To the extent that the social fabric is unraveling, that's an issue tailor-made for women."(1) Political progress for women is frequently tied to the disintegration of an existing social order. The chance to grab at a bouquet half-tossed...

Rend(er)ing 'L.C.': Susan Daitch meets Borges & Borges, Delacroix, Marx, Derrida, Daumier, and other textualized bodies.
June 22, 1993... The Gallery Foyer: Epigraphs(1) The silent printing-press parts stored in the ship's hold twitch with unwritten sentences, language waiting to be born. Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in...

Sentimental educations. (novelists Susan Daitch and Gustave Flaubert)
June 22, 1993... Translators, you might say, are paradoxical performers whose greatest virtuosity consists in making themselves invisible. "In my translation, I've tried to be true to the original," writes Jane Amme, a character in Susan Daitch's novel L.C...

Into the heart of things: passion and perception in Susan Daitch's 'The Colorist.'
June 22, 1993... With L. C, Susan Daitch established herself among the more gifted novelists of her generation, and in The Colorist - actually an elaboration of a novella that preceded L.C. - she again marshaled impressive erudition to the service of a...

An interview with David Foster Wallace. (Interview)
June 22, 1993... Larry McCanery: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What's your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or...

E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction.
June 22, 1993... Act Natural Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway...

From 'Infinite Jest.' (excerpt)
June 22, 1993... The night after the depressing and awkward joint Interdependence Day party for Enfield's Ennet House Recovery Home, Somerville's Phoenix House, and Dorchester's grim New Choices juvenile rehab, Ennet House staffer Johnette Foltz took Ken Erdedy...

Termite art, or Wallace's Wittgenstein. (David Foster Wallace)
June 22, 1993... If you do know that there is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest It's a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they're about equally strange. Reality Termites vs. the White Elephants Might I not believe that once,...

Reading and riding the post-scientific wave: the shorter fiction of David Foster Wallace.
June 22, 1993... The influential swing toward meaning and away from sense is as discernible on the wilder shores of contemporary American fiction as it is in the shored up wilds of that contemporary fiction that is America. Its consequence has bean a much...

Fighting to write: a short reminiscence of D.F. Wallace.
June 22, 1993... Between April Fool's Day and the Fourth of July, 1989, I wrote a small book with David Foster Wallace. Wallace and I were splitting a two-bedroom flop in the soot-path of the Monsignor McGrath Highway, Boston. Wallace studied philosophy at...

Caprice.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... There's never been anyone like him. A number of writers over the years have been called Firbankian - early Waugh, Van Vechten, more recent novelists like James McCourt, Edmund Apffel, Alan Hollinghurst - but none of them has been able to...

Valmouth and Other Novels.
June 22, 1993... There's never been anyone like him. A number of writers over the years have been called Firbankian - early Waugh, Van Vechten, more recent novelists like James McCourt, Edmund Apffel, Alan Hollinghurst - but none of them has been able to...

Albucius.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... The French original of this book was reviewed in our Spring 1991 issue, where John Taylor called "this compelling novel-essay-biography" of the Roman writer Albucius (69 B.C.-10 A.D.) a tour de force of historical fiction, less like Robert...

Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... These two anthologies will interest readers of this particular issue of the Review, not simply because Vollmann is in both and Wallace in Love Is Strange, but because they also include many of the authors named in the interviews: Eurudice, Mark...

Love Is Strange: Stories of Postmodern Romance.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1993... These two anthologies will interest readers of this particular issue of the Review, not simply because Vollmann is in both and Wallace in Love Is Strange, but because they also include many of the authors named in the interviews: Eurudice, Mark...

A checklist of books by William T. Vollmann, Susan Daitch, and David Foster Wallace. (Bibliography)
June 22, 1993... You Bright and Risen Angels. Deutsch, 1987; Atheneum, 1988. The Rainbow Stories. Deutsch, 1989; Atheneum, 1989. The Ice-Shirt (Seven Dreams I). Viking, 1990; Deutsch, 1991. Whores for Gloria. Picador, 1991; Pantheon, 1992. Thirteen Stories,...