The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 1994

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 1994

The far north and the deep south: contemporary fiction in the Netherlands and Flanders. (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... DOES RECENT FLEMISH literary prose tend to be "postmodern" and its Dutch counterpart more "classical"? The first part of this introduction covers Dutch literature and the second part covers Flemish literature, but I am afraid we need to define...

The white tents by the tall windows. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Het boek der nauwe relaties: Journal brut Boek Twee') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... CROAGNES, A PLACE, A WORD to linger on forever, and not just in a manner of speaking. The sun is shy and gentle in this accursed spring. Six years ago there was a biting January wind here, and for a moment it seems as if that bitter weather...

The charred alphabet. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Het verkoolde alfabet: Dagboek 1990-1991') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... MIDNIGHT. Outside, a tall sky full of stars and a moon like a slice of melon cut with a sharp knife. Inside, tobacco-smelling warmth, an overflowing ashtray, a small circle of light that briefly encloses the world he is writing about. An image...

A gentle destruction. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Een zachte vernieling') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... I CLIMBED INTO THE FRONT of the taxi. The two sun worshippers Sabine and Bernard were lying against each other in the back; they were both sunburned, her color a bit lighter, more amber, with golden hairs on her forearms. There was something...

That is to say. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Dat wil zeggen') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... IF I UNDERSTAND YOU correctly, if I can imagine the rules according to which you think, if I can listen in the way that you talk. If you understand me correctly, if you can imagine the rules according to which I think, if you can listen in...

Subjects. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Onderwerpen') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... THE DAYS WHEN THOSE who managed to stay alive didn't as it were love and enjoy life so much as the absence of death, life had become something of a bad habit to them, they drank Coke and ate hot dogs in stodgy rolls, if it turned out that way,...

The siege of Laken. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Het beleg van Laken') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... I WILL GLADLY EXPRESS feelings that can warm the hearts of others, but I refuse to burden the world with my troubles. For this reason people sometimes reproach me for showing so little sympathy in the face of suffering. Does everything leave me...

The accursed fathers. (fiction) (excerpt from 'De vermaledijde vaders') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... Do I SEE YOU SHAKING with laughter? Even your eyes laughing? Are you beside yourself with glee? Is it killing you? Always knew you'd die a hero's death. Choking with laughter. Purple and green from giggling. Consumed with joy. Taken up alive...

White always looks good. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Wit is altijd schoon') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... "COME ON, THEN," she said. "Come on in." "What is it? Oh, you're still upset about it, aren't you?" "Well, but you've known for a long time that you had to expect it sometime. All right, now it's happened." "But that I'd look...

Feminine singular. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Vrouwelijk enkelvoud') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... THE WHITE BLOUSE Sylvia has to wear to work in the restaurant is soiled at the end of the day with soup, with cocoa, with chocolate, with cream. It's hanging over a chair. The sweat has seeped into the lace collar. She keeps dreaming she...

Borders of deserts. (fiction) (excerpt from 'De grenzen van woestijnen') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... I CAME ACROSS NAJA in the Nicanor Bar and recognized her at once. It was ten years since I had seen her; then she had been a nineteen-year-old student sitting in front of me--or rather some yards above and to one side of me, for at that time I...

Island. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Weerberichten') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... ACCORDING TO THE BROCHURE, the island can be reached only by boat. "How else," I say, "would you reach an island?" "Do you mean that?" he asks. "What?" I say. "That you don't know how else you could reach an island?" "By...

The artist and his model. (poem) (excerpt from 'De schilder en zijn model') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... THE DAY AFTER THE DAY he would have come to see her, but didn't, she hopes he will not come to see her anymore, but he does anyway. She went to her lover so she would not have to sit and wait for him. She looks unattractive so she doesn't have...

The 1958 world's fair. (fiction) (excerpt from 'Conversaties met K.') (New Flemish Fiction)
June 22, 1994... Progress (A TELEPHONE CONVERSATION of which a complete transcript has been preserved.) "K.? Robert here." "Hello, Robert. How are you? And Betty?" "Fine, K., thank you. The reason I'm calling, in April '58 a Universal...

Postwar Dutch fiction in English translation since 1980: a checklist. (New Flemish Fiction) (Bibliography)
June 22, 1994... Alberts, A. The Islands. Trans. Hans Koning. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983. (De eilanden, 1952.) Arends, Jan. "Breakfast." In The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy. Ed. and trans. Richard Huijing. Sawtry: Dedalus, 1993....

The novel of learning: endangered species.
June 22, 1994... BERTRAND RUSSELL ONCE SAID that he knew of only six people--three Poles and three Texans--who had persisted to the end of the third volume of his vast 6000-page Principia Mathematica. I am not making a plea here for such perdurability or...

Timothy O'Keefe: 1926-1994. (Obituary)
June 22, 1994... TIMOTHY O'KEEFFE, among the most important publishing editors of the century, died in London on January 11. He was responsible, among other accomplishments, for resurrecting the career of Flann O'Brien and for publishing William Gaddis's The...

A Table of Green Fields.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The ten stories in this collection, erudite, at times hermetic, go under a title taken from Falstaff's dying vision of "a table of green fields." The stories are all complex events told in the clipped, gnomic, unorthodox manner by which now we...

Profane Friendship.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Although many reviewers of The Runaway Soul, Brodkey's previous novel, did not perceive the triumphant passages dealing with the nature of memory, language, and salvation, they cannot be as blind with this admirable novel. Profane Friendship...

Going Native.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Going Native is less a novel than a linked set of short stories, like Winesburg, Ohio; and like Anderson before him, Wright is interested in the grotesque, those variants from what used to be called the norm, a concept that has been losing...

Piano Stories.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Gabriel Garcia Marquez says that had he not read Felisberto Hernandez in 1950, he would not be the writer he is today. Julio Cortazar and Italo Calvino have likewise praised the author of Piano Stories, who nonetheless died in 1964 a failure in...

Urban Bliss.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Babette Bliss, a delightfully high-strung and not-just-a-little-desperate Bronx-born thirty-five-year-old Jewish woman living on the West Side of Manhattan, is busy juggling three huge life crises. First, she's getting a little older every day...

The Book of Nights.
June 22, 1994... These three novels are all part of the Verba Mundi collection, a new series of literature in translation published by Godine that focuses on modern world literature and features both well-established authors such as J. M. G. Le Clezio and...

The Prospector.
June 22, 1994... These three novels are all part of the Verba Mundi collection, a new series of literature in translation published by Godine that focuses on modern world literature and features both well-established authors such as J. M. G. Le Clezio and...

Honeymoon.
June 22, 1994... These three novels are all part of the Verba Mundi collection, a new series of literature in translation published by Godine that focuses on modern world literature and features both well-established authors such as J. M. G. Le Clezio and...

The Son of Laughter.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Frederick Buechner has written that he believes all lives are "sacred journeys." His novels have dramatized this proposition, several of them-- the Book of Bebb tetralogy, Godric, Brendan--presenting characters whose lives are also consciously...

Ghosts.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... At his best, Irish novelist John Banville employs an incisive prose that is at once crystalline and obscure. He cares less for plot and character than for language itself --but in giving himself to language, he cannot help but creat eccentric...

Kepler.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... At his best, Irish novelist John Banville employs an incisive prose that is at once crystalline and obscure. He cares less for plot and character than for language itself --but in giving himself to language, he cannot help but create eccentric...

Doctor Copernicus.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... At his best, Irish novelist John Banville employs an incisive prose that is at once crystalline and obscure. He cares less for plot and character than for language itself --but in giving himself to language, he cannot help but create eccentric...

The Red Virgin.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Fernando Arrabal's The Red Virgin is about planned parenthood in extremis. Presented as a letter to the dead daughter she has murdered with a revolver, The Red Virgin is an apologia for the most extravagant form of materfamilias, the conception...

Out with the Stars.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Although Purdy is one of our best writers--Malcolm, The Nephew, and I Am Elijah Thrush and, perhaps, his masterpieces--he has never received the critical attention he deserves. (Perhaps only Tony Tanner and George Steiner have recognized his...

Blue: A Novel.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Rickshaw Jones, a successful blues guitarist, watches her twin sister's plane explode on the airport runway. You might say Blue opens with a bang. Isra Jones's yellow body bag gets more of Ricki's attention than the plane crash, however. Ricki...

Mean Woman.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In this 1989 novel, the Argentine writer Alicia Borinsky offers a scathing vision of a failed revolution. With keen irony, Borinsky's disjointed narrative skewers the hypocrisies of Francisco, the dictator of an unnamed country, and his wife...

I'm No Truck: Sixteen Stories.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Annie Saumont's work has been compared to that of Samuel Beckett, but, personally, I find it more akin to that of Marguerite Duras. Saumont writes nervously, edgily, with the flair for the coup de theatre that characterized Beckett's earliest...

The Road to Wellville.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Set in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1907, Boyle's Road to Wellville focuses on the plights of Will Lightbody and Charlie Ossining. Lightbody is plagued by his rebellious gut and his health-conscious wife, at whose insistence he is treated by Dr....

Sixty-Nine.
June 22, 1994... Ryu Murakami's Sixty-Nine is an autobiographical novel that looks back at a group of high school students stuck in the sticks of western Japan in 1969 but doing their damnedest nevertheless to be part of the youthquake then shaking the world....

Stripping and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... These two gorgeously designed offerings from High Risk, English publisher Serpent's Tail's new primarily American imprint, hold little in common. In fact, there is virtually nothing "high risk" either stylistically or thematically about Pagan...

Rent Boy.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... These two gorgeously designed offerings from High Risk, English publisher Serpent's Tail's new primarily American imprint, hold little in common. In fact, there is virtually nothing "high risk" either stylistically or thematically about Pagan...

Me and My Mom.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when many of us went over the river to grandmother's house for the holidays. Today--thanks to the miracle of pharmacology, the availability of nursing homes, many of which cry out for vengeance,...

As You Desire.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This is a novel about longing. Two unfulfilled loves--the love of Elizabeth for her therapist, Cecilia, and her dead brother, a young suicide--emotionally guide the visionary protagonist and the reader through this promising first novel. The...

Broadway Melody of 1999.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Robert Steiner's arcane vocabulary and well-wrought sentences are more impressive than his inability to cohere his brilliant pieces into a satisfying whole. Broadway Melody of 1999 is a metafictional cutup, stylistically reminiscent of Coover...

Open Doors and Three Novellas.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The four pieces collected here represent the final work of Sicilian novelist, essayist, dramatist, and short story writer Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989). In this collection Sciascia, as Joseph Farrell so aptly argues in his afterword, "re-covers...

The Invention of Truth.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Toward the middle of this beautifully written (and skillfully translated) first novel, Marta Morazzoni quotes Ruskin's observation that "The outside of a French cathedral... is always to be thought of as the wrong side of the stuff, in which...

Maggie: A Love Story.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Maggie (Marguerite Roberts, one of Hollywood's most successful screenwriters) is John Sanford's lifelong love, Maggie, his lifelong love story. And since this story is all about relationships, it is autobiography, as honest a portrait of a...

Miss You Like Crazy.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... By way of Graceland, the Drive-In Christian Church, and the Your Destiny Tea Room, Miss You Like Crazy, Eliza Clark's buoyant first novel, follows its heroine, Maylou Puce Turner, from her parents' retirement home in Largo, Florida, to Topeka,...

Headhunter.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Uwe Timm's Headhunter, a novel about high finance in Hamburg, Germany (the Ivan Boesky syndrome), takes our hero from Hamburg to Costa del Sol, Spain to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil to Santiago, Chile to Easter Island, and back again to Hamburg to...

The Naughty Yard.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This startlingly fine first novella, The Naughty Yard, begins and ends in bed. The narrator, Mike, commences by recounting a story about his ex-lover Kathy and him, together after a lengthy separation, having sex in her small apartment in...

Ben's Exit.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Baby-boomers John Collins and Ben Carlson grew up together in "Lotusland." They surfed, worked at Disneyland, and briefly explored the psychedelic scene before settling on careers in academia. Now both are professors at U.C. Irvine. John is a...

Try.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The writer Robert Hardin has noted "Dennis Cooper will be remembered as the most prophetic writer of his time." These are strong words, and one can keep them in mind when reading Cooper's latest post-punk novel Try. The main character, Ziggy,...

Selected Writings.
June 22, 1994... Although it is easy to use the cliches criminal, homosexual, and thief about Genet, I find that this litany no longer appeals to me, largely because Edmund White has had the courage and brilliance to transform this seminal artist. His generous...

Daughters of Eve: Women's Writing from the German Democratic Republic.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... At long last we have a comprehensive, solidly translated volume of writings by women from the German Democratic Republic! Lukens and Rosenberg's anthology of twenty-five texts represents the evolution of German women's writing from the East...

On Love: A Novel.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... "Trop penser me font amours--love makes me think too much," sings a fifteenth-century troubadour in Roland Barthes's Fragments of a Lover's Discourse. Or, as the narrator of Alain de Botton's first novel claims, "The philosopher in the bedroom...

Postcards on Parade.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... These two books, one a record of Elmslie's long writing career, the other a musical play, show the scope of his work. For editor (and publisher) Bamberger, the bibliography covers Elmslie as poet, librettist, lyricist, novelist, short story...

Kenward Elmslie: A Bibliographic Profile.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... These two books, one a record of Elmslie's long writing career, the other a musical play, show the scope of his work. For editor (and publisher) Bamberger, the bibliography covers Elmslie as poet, librettist, lyricist, novelist, short story...

Before Night Falls.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Before Night Falls is a memoir that spans Arenas's life in Cuba as well as his escape to the United States. Written while Arenas was dying of AIDS, the book is relentlessly (and explicitly) honest about his sexual life as a Cuban gay. Its chief...

Journey to the Interior and Other Stories.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... The ten stories in this collection are fine examples of acute character drawing in well-observed and varied locales. Each reflects the author's travels, his awareness of nuances, his sense of irony. He is especially attuned to women: their...

Airing Dirty Laundry.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... Oscar Wilde warned us about airing (or washing) our clean linen in public. Now Ishmael Reed, that Reckless Eyeballer of American values, family and otherwise, airs plenty of dirty laundry in thirty-five pieces written over the last fifteen...

Green Dreams: Essays Under the Influence of Irish.
June 22, 1994... The world that Michael Stephens has explored in Season at Coole and in other works is, for the most part, Irish-American New York--East New York and Mineola in particular. In Green Dreams, Stephens has produced a quite wonderful collection of...

Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles, 1970-1992.
June 22, 1994... To collect and reprint one's literary and political essays from a period of over twenty years is at best a courageous act and at worst a foolhardy one. Artistic assessments formulated in the immediacy of a book's publication can, after time,...

The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... In comparison with Thomas Pynchon, his one novelistic peer, Gaddis has received relatively little critical attention. But the three books and one essay collection that have appeared are all of high quality, and Gaddis critics have been, if...

Augusto Roa Bastos's "I the Supreme."
June 22, 1994... First, read I the Supreme by Roa Bastos in the original Knopf hardcover edition. There are plenty of copies around. The paperback version will do, but the page seems cramped while the original allows the reader the circumstantial delight of a...

The Critics Who Made Us.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... I want to direct attention to this wonderful collection, consisting of more than twenty essays on such diverse critics as Winters, Empson, Brooks, and Burke. The elegant essays are by Spears, Core, Heilman, and others. Thus we have the good...

Impossible Choices: The Implications of Cultural References in the Novels of Manuel Puig.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1994... This is Pamela Bacarisse's second book on Manuel Puig. It is a detailed, learned, and, in some instances, an interdisciplinary study of Puig's use of cultural allusions. Her treatment assumes a high degree of familiarity with all of Puig's...