The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 1997

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 1997

Wilson Harris: an introduction.
June 22, 1997... Harris has done so much to unblock the Western mind-set. But even now genius is not totally inhibited by all the counter-forces of the world in crisis. Harris may be one sign of a changing wind. --Kathleen Raine All...

Quetzalcoatl and the smoking mirror: reflections on originality and tradition.
June 22, 1997... There are conflicting legends about the parentage of Quetzalcoatl. One is inclined to say he was an orphan. And the legend of the "orphan song of ancient Mexico"--upon which I shall comment later--may well confirm this. Some of his putative...

From 'Jonestown.'(fiction)(excerpt)
June 22, 1997... The Longman Chronicle of America tells of the "tragedy of Jonestown" and of the scene of "indescribable horror" which met the eyes of reporters from every corner of the globe when they arrived in stricken Jonestown after the self-inflicted...

Discovering Wilson Harris.
June 22, 1997... It is the mark of the new that we never know what it will be until it arrives. Of one thing only we can be sure, that it is unpredictable and is never the outcome of existing "trends." The wind that bloweth where it listeth is unconstrained,...

Lines composed after reading 'The Guyana Quartet.' (novels by Wilson Harris)
June 22, 1997... A garden and below it a forest sloping away down a valley comprise the landscape beyond my window, a world populated--naturally enough, because there can be no intermediate state--by the living and the dead. One ought to be able to affirm that...

Wilson Harris "in the forests of the night."
June 22, 1997... For those of us who are following Wilson Harris in the tradition of Guyanese literature, there is no doubt that he has transformed the literary landscape of the region, and we would be unwise (as would the rest of the world) to ignore his blazing...

Postcoloniality/modernity: Wilson Harris and postcolonial theory.
June 22, 1997... The continuing theoretical debate over the shape and size, the resonances and the responsibilities, of postcolonialism grows daily more complex. Questions of what might be termed--generalizing--the "local" (an adversarial nationalism, an...

Toward the reading of Wilson Harris.
June 22, 1997... This essay sketches an approach to the nature of narrative in Wilson Harris's writing. I have chosen a passage ending book 2 of Palace of the Peacock, running between pages 26 and 31 of the one-volume edition of The Guyana Quartet (Faber and...

Breaking down barriers as genesis of a new beginning in Wilson Harris's 'Palace of the Peacock.'
June 22, 1997... Palace of the Peacock, Wilson Harris's first novel, tells us of a scientific expedition from the savannahs into the interior of the Guyana forest, which the head of the expedition, Donne, and his crew can reach only by river. I should like to...

The leech-gatherer and the Arawak woman. (similarities between the work of William Wordsworth and Wilson Harris)
June 22, 1997... One of Wilson Harris's most extraordinary passages of writing comes not in his fiction, but in an essay published in 1973. Harris tells of two moments of danger surveying the Potaro river above the Tumatumari rapids at a time of high water. An...

New personalities: race, sexuality, and gender in Wilson Harris's recent fiction.
June 22, 1997... In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. --James Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man In Tradition, the Writer and Society, his first collection of essays, Wilson Harris writes eloquently of "the series of...

Creative bridges: some aspects of myth in "Couvade" and 'The Four Banks of the River of Space.'
June 22, 1997... The multidimensional nature of myths, their oral transmission and constant transformation, makes it impossible for them to be known in their entirety. In the contemporary context Wilson Harris perceives further complication in the inevitable...

Renewal in a far more resonant key: reflections on the mad, sin-eating relics of fire in 'Resurrection at Sorrow Hill.'
June 22, 1997... Kenneth Ramchand's virtually prophetic observation in 1968 that "Palace of the Peacock contains all Harris's basic themes, and anticipates his later designs" resounds as late as 1993 with an uncanny accuracy. For in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill we...

Charting the uncapturable in Wilson Harris's writing.
June 22, 1997... He saw the complexities yet simplicities of a fiction one may involuntarily write which involves a broken family with an entire humanity though its seed lies in obscure provinces, obscure sorrow hills. --Wilson Harris,...

"Space sounds" in Wilson Harris's recent fiction.
June 22, 1997... "We may carve or sculpt or paint with a hand that falters even as it seeks the true, exact hand it can never capture, Timehri, hand of God.... "I have dreamt, Judge, of writing a manifesto of the ship of the globe...

Wilson Harris at Faber and Faber.
June 22, 1997... When I was asked to contribute to this issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, I felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and apprehension. Here was the chance to record my feelings about one of the most rewarding relationships in my personal...

A Wilson Harris checklist.(Bibliography)
June 22, 1997... Novel Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). The Far Journey of Oudin (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). The Whole Armour (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). The Secret Ladder (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). Heartland (London:...

Alan Burns: an introduction.
June 22, 1997... I first came to Alan Burns's fiction accidentally. Professor Jay Halio, who was editing a section of the Dictionary of Literary Biography on contemporary British novelists, invited me to contribute an article. Searching through a list of...

An interview with Alan Burns.(Interview)
June 22, 1997... This interview was conducted entirely through the mail from May to September 1994. As I finished rereading each of his eight novels, I would send a group of questions to Burns and he would respond. Often our letters crossed in the mail, and...

Imaginary dictionary. (poem)
June 22, 1997... ESPLANADE Stride along the promenade, all the way to Spain. Iron legs in water, step across to Spain. MUFFIN ff are its doughy insides mmmm ANNA consummate symmetry: hint of...

Two chapters from a book provisionally titled 'Human Like the Rest of Us: A Life of B. S. Johnson' (fiction)(excerpt)
June 22, 1997... October 22-25 1973 Chapter: Fat Man on a Beach VOICE: This is a film about a fat man on a beach. VOICE: Did you hear what I said? This is a film about a fat man on a beach. VOICE: Do you really want to sit there and watch...

Through that tunnel.
June 22, 1997... This short text has to be written under difficult conditions, with none of Alan Burns's novels to hand, in a hurry, when about to move offices, and it is based entirely on memory and impulse, on Alan's request. Alan sent me a short novel...

Identity and Alan Burns.
June 22, 1997... "The loss of identity today is so great that one only exists through the media. The kick one gets from being in the papers is quite profound--the contemporary god has registered one's existence." This is 1970. Alan Burns is talking to me for a...

Fine cut: Alan Burns's collage prose.
June 22, 1997... In 1965 Alan Burns waded into the stale, tepid waters of English novel writing with a stunning book: Europe after the Rain, inspired by Max Ernst's panoramic painting of the same name which spanned the book's front and back covers. Written with...

A note on Alan Burns's fiction.
June 22, 1997... Alan Burns belongs, I find, with a significant body of imaginative writers who are aware of legacies of tradition, in the art of the novel, that denote an impasse in narratives of realism. I perceive some measure of mutual association in his work...

Burns's aleatoric 'Celebrations': smashing hegemony at the sentence level. (author Alan Burns)
June 22, 1997... Is social change more likely to be produced by a "committed," "relevant" literature that reaches a large audience by observing bourgeois conventions like character development, linear narrative, and closure? Or by a literature that...

Right you go, left with Burns. (Alan Burns's 'The Angry Brigade')
June 22, 1997... The author's prefatory remark that his story "is told naturally in different tones of voice and different accents" could appropriately introduce any well-made novel such as a Trollope or a Hardy might write, except that in their work such an...

In his own Alan. (author Alan Burns)
June 22, 1997... Alan's prose has always interested me. Sometimes it has driven me mad. "He hugged her with an arm that weighed heavy. Though the boy was thin, his arms were strong. Now the big lad grew." As I told Alan once, it reminds me of writing a brilliant...

The texture of life lived.
June 22, 1997... In the fall of 1985 I received a request from the University of Minnesota to provide them with an evaluation of the fiction of Alan Burns, who was then being considered for promotion to full professor. I had heard of Alan Burns's work but had not...

Alan Burns and the velocity of a dream.
June 22, 1997... In his introduction to The Imagination on Trial Charles Sugnet argues that in spite of the prevailing American myth that has writing in England remaining traditional and even nostalgic, it is in fact--particularly as demonstrated by the...

An Alan Burns checklist.(Bibliography)
June 22, 1997... Fiction Buster, in New Writers One. London: John Calder, 1961; New York: Red Dust, 1972. Europe after the Rain. London: John Calder, 1965; New York: John Day, 1970. Celebrations. London: Calder and Boyars, 1967. Babel. London:...

The bookstore in America: Borders.
June 22, 1997... This is the first in a series of articles that will appear about bookstores and bookselling in America. At first glance, it might seem odd that this is a subject worth theorizing about, perhaps even odder that the Review of Contemporary Fiction...

Reviewing, reviewers, authors, publishers, and censorship.
June 22, 1997... Editor's Note: What follows is a series of responses resulting from the fact that I rejected Brooke Horvath's review of Doug Rice's Blood of Mugwump, a novel published by FC2 in 1996. I invited Mr. Horvath, if he wished to have the review...

Aureole.
June 22, 1997... Carole Maso. Ecco, 1996. 214 pp. $22.00. Aureole is an exploration of liminal states, "the place where one thing is about to change into another." The spaces between light and dark, waking and dream, and language and meaning are only some of...

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments.
June 22, 1997... David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown, 1997. 353pp. $23.95. Anyone not enamored by last year's spectacular Infinite Jest might suspect that a lame self-referential joke lies buried in the title of this collection, but the essays themselves prove...

Cocaine Nights.
June 22, 1997... J. G. Ballard. Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1996. 329 pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. Criminality has become a kind of performance art at the end of this millennium, the protagonist of J. G. Ballard's wonderful new novel notes, the last real impetus...

My Life, Starring Dara Falcon.
June 22, 1997... Ann Beattie. Knopf, 1997. 307 pp. $24.00. I am writing this review on April 24; the pub date for this novel is May 12. But today I read Michiko Kakutani's review of the book in the New York Times, appearing two and a half weeks before...

The Marabou Stork Nightmares.
June 22, 1997... Irvine Welsh, Norton, 1996. 284 pp. Paper: $13.00. Welsh is back with the schemies. In his novel The Marabou Stork Nightmares, Irvine Welsh revisits the life of raging Scottish youth with the same fury and honesty as Trainspotting and Acid...

The Cattle Killing.
June 22, 1997... Wideman, John Edgar. Houghton Mifflin, 1996. 212 pp. $22.95. John Edgar Wideman's fiction is always a good stiff shot, clearing away the fog of certainty and revealing the terrifying depths of complexity. Whenever you step into one of Wideman's...

Children of Darkness and Light.
June 22, 1997... Nicholas Mosley. Seeker & Warburg, 1996. 241 pp. 15.99 [pounds sterling]. At 241 pages Children of Darkness and Light is an easier read than Mosley's imposing 1990 Whitbread Prize winner Hopeful Monsters; however like almost all of Mosley's...

Briar Rose.
June 22, 1997... Robert Coover. Grove, 1996. 86 pp. $18.00. Last year, Robert Coover marked the thirtieth anniversary of his first novel with John's Wife, a huge, sprawling narrative tracing dozens of characters over thirty years or so of their town's and our...

The Woman and the Ape.
June 22, 1997... Peter Hoeg. Trans. by Barbara Haveland. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. 261 pp. $23.00. Peter Hoeg's fourth novel defies easy categorization. It is at once a tale of personal strength, a love story, and an ecological morality tale. To choose...

Couplings.
June 22, 1997... Peter Schneider. Trans. Philip Boehm. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. 293 pp. $24.00. German author Peter Schneider's 1992 novel Paarungen, newly translated by Philip Boehm, uses the intertwined narratives of three (anti-)love stories to lead...

Idoru.
June 22, 1997... William Gibson. Putnam, 1996. 292 pp. $24.95. It's been well over a decade since William Gibson blasted into heavy rotation on the alternative literary charts with his cyberpunk classic Neuromancer (1984), surely the novel for which he'll be...

Selected Stories.
June 22, 1997... Alice Munro. Knopf, 1996. 545 pp. $30.00. "If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. I didn't stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find...

The Discovery of Heaven.
June 22, 1997... Harry Mulisch. Trans. Paul Vincent. Viking, 1996. 729 pp. $34.95. Although I have read this erudite, witty masterpiece only once, I must assert that it is one of the great novels since World War II. The novel--filled with references to The New...

Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies.
June 22, 1997... Tom De Haven, Metropolitan Books, 1996. 290 pp. Paper: $12.00. A sequel of sorts to De Haven's novel of early comic-strip publishing, Funny Papers (1985), Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies follows narrator Al Bready as the comic-strip...

The Pope's Rhinoceros.
June 22, 1997... Lawrence Norfolk. Harmony Books, 1996. 574 pp. $25.00. It was 1515 and Pope Leo, a Medici, wanted a rhinoceros to go with his elephant. He didn't want to exert himself in acquiring it and didn't have to, what with sea powers like Spain and...

Collected Stories.
June 22, 1997... by Djuna Barnes. Ed. Phillip Herring. Sun & Moon, 1996. 488 pp. $24.95. In 1982, the year that Djuna Barnes died, Sun & Moon Press collected her early short fiction in Smoke and Other Early Stories. It published Barnes's theatrical interviews...

The Tenor Saxophonist's Story.
June 22, 1997... Josef Skvorecky. Trans. Caleb Crain, Ka ca Polackova Henley, and Peter Kussi. Ecco, 1996. 161 pp. $23.00. Josef Skvorecky wrote the ten stories of love and disappointment that comprise this novel while living in Prague during the hardening of...

The Woman Who Walked into Doors.
June 22, 1997... Roddy Doyle. Penguin/Viking, 1996. 226 pp. $22.95; Paper: $11.95. Roddy Doyle's fifth novel concerns the life and love of Paula Spencer, a thirty-nine-year-old woman, alcoholic, mother of four (her fifth, a miscarriage the result of her...

S & M.
June 22, 1997... Jeffrey DeShell. FC2, 1997. 231 pp. Paper: $11.95. In Jeffrey DeShell's hugely funny, hugely savvy second novel, S&M, a woman photographer named S-- has just split with one lesbian lover and shacked up with another, this latter busy composing a...

The Handmaid of Desire.
June 22, 1997... John L'Heureux. Soho, 1996. 264 pp. $23.00. John L'Hueureux's exceedingly clever novel of academic life is set in the English department of an unnamed California university. It's a place of tricks and schemes run amok, where the...

Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You.
June 22, 1997... Chappell, Fred. Picador USA, 1996. 228 pp. $21.00. A framed series of linked stories in the manner of Winesburg, Ohio, Fred Chappell's newest book returns to the world of I Am One of You Forever and Brighten the Corner Where You Are to recount...

Waterweed in the Wash-Houses.
June 22, 1997... Jeanne Hyvrard. Trans. Elsa Copeland. Columbia Univ. Press, 1997. 136 pp. Paper: $16.95. This text, distributed by Columbia University Press, is a wonderfully occult meditation on women, language, politics, and philosophy. It is, in many ways,...

Interior Design: Stories.
June 22, 1997... Philip Graham. Scribner, 160 pp. $20.00. In "Lucky," one of eight stories in Philip Graham's new collection, Interior Designs, Pete, a long-time owner of a men's clothing store, begins a private daily ritual of whispering "good-bye" and "good...

Need.
June 22, 1997... Nik Cohn. Secker & Warburg, 1996. 298 pp. 15.99 [pounds sterling]. Amid cockfights, topless carwashes, and acrobatic acts, the four main characters of Nik Cohn's novel Need meet together in a Manhattan zoo where exotic birds and snakes are...

The Hotel in the Jungle.
June 22, 1997... Albert J. Guerard. Baskerville, 1996. 391 pp. $23.00. Although Guerard is one of our distinguished critics (of Conrad, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky) and teachers of writing (of Hawkes), he deserves serious attention as a novelist. Guerard is...

Breaking Through: A Narrative of the Great Work.
June 22, 1997... Andre VandenBroeck. Introduction by Colin Wilson. City Lights, 1996. 374 pp. Paper: $15.95. Breaking Through is a rough-edged philosophical treatise and novel about many things--among them art, time, technology, language, rocks, human bodies,...

Where the Oceans Meet.
June 22, 1997... Bhargavi C. Mandava. Seal Press, 1996. 283 pp. $22.95. Bhargavi C. Mandava's Where the Oceans Meet is a collection of stories about traditional India and Indians in conflict with the past and the present. The isolated souls in these tales are...

The Book of Lazarus.
June 22, 1997... Richard Grossman. FC2, 1997. 450 pp. $19.95. Like Grossman's earlier work, The Alphabet Man, The Book of Lazarus begins with a lot of promise. The book is an interesting collage of photographs, drawings, handwritten notes, letters, political...

Gas Station.
June 22, 1997... This first novel by poet Joseph Torra reads like a series of interconnected prose poems. There is no plot to speak of but rather bits and pieces that slowly accrue into a vivid and compelling picture of a working-class boy and his father in...

What Goes without Saying.
June 22, 1997... Josephine Jacobsen. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. 335 pp. $29.95. Each story evicts characters from their everyday lives, where everyone spoke the language and roads took their predictable course according to memories and road signs. Whether...

Flickering Shadows.
June 22, 1997... Kwadwo Agymah Kaman. Coffee House Press, 1996. 300 pp. $21.95. Barbados born Kwadwo Agymah Kamau's first novel follows a small Caribbean island's struggle through the latest round of colonialism's three-pronged advance of Christianity, mineral...

Johnny Critelli.
June 22, 1997... Frank Lentricchia. Scribner, 1996. 268 pp. $22.00. Although these two novels supposedly stand alone, they must be read as one. Each novel echoes the other--the principal images of mutilation, ejaculation, and conception recur. The novel, as I...

The Knifemen.
June 22, 1997... Frank Lentricchia. Scribner, 1996. 268 pp. $22.00. Although these two novels supposedly stand alone, they must be read as one. Each novel echoes the other--the principal images of mutilation, ejaculation, and conception recur. The novel, as I...

Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926.
June 22, 1997... Walter Benjamin. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Harvard Univ. Press, 1996. 520 pp. $35.00. Although many of our lovers of theory demand French citizenship--they keep quoting Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault, and other usual suspects--they...

A Mammal's Notebook: Collected Writings of Erik Satie.
June 22, 1997... Erik Satie. Ed. Ornella Volta. Trans. Antony Melville. Atlas Arkhive Documents of the Avant-Garde. Atlas Press, 1996. 206 pp. $24.99. Fifth in Atlas Arkhive's Documents of the Avant-Garde series, this handsome volume boasts "the largest...

Paul Auster as the Wizard of Odds: "Moon Palace."
June 22, 1997... Chenetier, Marc. Didier Erudition, 1996. 190 pp. in this first full-length study of a single Auster work, Marc Chenetier argues for the centrality of Moon Palace in the author's oeuvre. Other readers of Auster's books might argue for the...

Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary.
June 22, 1997... Perloff, Marjorie. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996. 285 pp. $27-95. If books could be cataloged by season, Wittgenstein's Ladder would be a summer: clear, temperate, disencumbered of hibernal rigors, undisturbed by stormy skies. The book explores...

Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1, 1819-1851.
June 22, 1997... Hershel Parker. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. 941 pp. $39.95. "Typee," as Herman Melville was called for several years after the success of his first novel, was not only hailed by reviewers as the Modem Crusoe but also harangued by a host of...

Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce and Lawrence.
June 22, 1997... Joyce Piell Wexler. Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1997. 157 pp. $24.00. This is one of the zaniest books I have ever read and yet also disturbing in terms of its implications. Stated simply, Wexler's theory is that modernist writers (among whom she...

Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Fiction by African-American Writers.
June 22, 1997... Shawn Stewart Ruff, ed. Holt, 1996. 544 pp. Paper: $16.95. While boy meets boy and girl falls for girl in this collection, Ruff's editorial vision is antiromance. Conflicts and confusions are not generally subsumed by the happily-ever-...

Daylight in Nightclub Inferno: Czech Fiction in the Post-Kundera Generation.
June 22, 1997... Elena Lappin, ed. Catbird Press, 1997. 307 pp. $15.95. Post- is the prefix of choice for contemporary Eastern Europe. The Czech Republic and other countries are typically said to be postcommunist. Post-defines the present as following the past,...

The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature.
June 22, 1997... Robert Welch, ed. Oxford Univ. Press, 1997. 614 pp. $49.95; John Sturrock, ed. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature is an excellent encyclopedic guide to Irish literature. Someone else may be able to find writers who are omitted, but I...

The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing.
June 22, 1997... Oxford Univ. Press, 1996. 492 pp. $35.00. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature is an excellent encyclopedic guide to Irish literature. Someone else may be able to find writers who are omitted, but I couldn't. Any companion that gets both...