The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from June 2000

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from June 2000

Kitty and Virgil.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Paul Bailey. Kitty and Virgil. Overlook Press, 2000. 280 pp. $25.95. Kitty is a Londoner who indexes nonfiction. Virgil is an exiled Romanian poet who sweeps for the city. In the late eighties, they meet by chance in the hospital, meet by...

Jean Rhys.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2000... One pleasure of being a reader or scholar of literature now is that theory and criticism have at last caught up with the challenging work of Jean Rhys (1890-1979). A writer of tremendous originality and wit, she explores her melancholy subjects...

John Hawkes.
June 22, 2000... John Clendennin Burne Hawkes, Jr., was born on 17 August 1925 in Stamford, Connecticut, to Helen (Ziefle) Hawkes and John Clendennin Burne. His mother was the daughter of a banker, and his father's family descended from Irish gentry. As a boy...

Paul Bowles.
June 22, 2000... When Paul Bowles died in Tangier, Morocco, in November 1999, one of the last remaining links to an entire artistic sensibility was also lost. His career, spanning nearly seventy years, was initiated with the publication of several of his poems...

Marguerite Young.
June 22, 2000... ... I am the delicate spirit who on the air does walk Woven of sinew and heart from sorrowful talk, A hesitant answer of what the heart believes, And even in his answer have I escaped, I am the insubstantial heart beat which goes From him,...

Miss Young, My Darling: A Memoir.
June 22, 2000... I remember, when the grey fog heaved outside the many-windowed nursery, when the fog swept like a heavy skirt outside and the wind sighed, Miss MacIntosh was dressed as for a long voyage, wearing her whaler's hat, her sea boots, there where we...

Plowing the Dark.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Richard Powers. Plowing the Dark. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 415 pp. $25.00. In an early scene in Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers's seventh and most recent novel, a virtual-reality researcher at a Puget Sound digital laboratory...

Disgrace.(Review)
June 22, 2000... J.M. Coetzee. Disgrace. Viking, 1999. 220 pp. $23.95. Not for the ethically faint of heart, the fiction of J. M. Coetzee has repeatedly strewn nettles in the bed of the comfortable social conscience. His most recent novel, winner of the...

"53 Days.".(Review)
June 22, 2000... Georges Perec. "53 Days." Ed. Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud. Trans. David Bellos. David R. Godine, 1999. 272 pp. $23.95. It's easy to feel cheated when reading posthumous works, especially unfinished drafts completed by other writers....

Kotik Letaev.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Andrei Bely. Kotik Letaev. Trans. Gerald Janecek. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 268 pp. $17.95. Life begins as a descent from greater to lesser capability; what passes before the mind's eye distinguishes one state from another. Initially...

Bogeywoman.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Jaimy Gordon. Bogeywoman. Sun and Moon, 1999. 343 pp. Paper: $12.95. Jaimy Gordon is an extraordinary writer and Bogeywoman is her best work so far. Readers familiar with the Rabelais-inspired Shamp of the City-Solo and her acclaimed road...

Silver.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Matthew Remski. Silver. Insomniac Press, 1998. 395 pp. Paper: $14.99. Like David Foster Wallace, Matthew Remski seems to be struggling with the aesthetic legacy of the high postmodernists: How is the young contemporary writer to make the...

Simple Stories: A Novel.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Ingo Schulze. Simple Stories: A Novel. Trans. John E. Woods. Knopf, 2000. 280 pp. $25.00. Schulze is of the most interesting German writers under forty. His first collection, 33 Moments of Happiness, demonstrates his ability to play with...

Pictures of a Dying Man.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Agymah Kamau. Pictures of a Dying Man. Coffee House, 1999. 230 pp. $23.95. In his second novel, Agymah Kamau explores the intricacies of rumors surrounding death and life within the cultural milieu of a small, unnamed Caribbean country....

The Pleasing Hour.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Lily King. The Pleasing Hour. Atlantic Monthly, 1999. 237 pp. $24.00. As an American au pair in Paris, Rosie is given an opportunity to fill a difficult role in a foreign household; while clearly an outsider, she is expected to learn and...

Delancey's Way.(Review)
June 22, 2000... James McCourt. Delancey's Way. Knopf, 2000. 369 pp. $25.00. Few literary writers take on Washington, D.C., probably for fear of stumbling into tired satire or overblown intrigue. James McCourt is undeterred by these risks, however, and...

The Clay Machine-Gun.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Victor Pelevin. The Clay Machine-Gun. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. Faber and Faber/Harbord Publishing, 1999. 335 pp. 9.99 [pounds sterling]. This controversial Russian sensation refashions the legend of V.I. Chapaev, a Civil War Red commander...

Make Believe.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Joanna Scott. Make Believe. Little, Brown, 2000. 246 pp. $23.95. "All images had stories to tell, causes to explain." Joanna Scott's new novel opens with the image of three-year-old Bo Templin, helplessly dangling from his seat belt in an...

The New Sweet Style.
June 22, 2000... Vassily Aksyonov. The New Sweet Style. Random House, 1999. 482 pp. $29.95. One would think that more attention would be paid to a writer with Vassily Aksyonov's history. Author of an anthem for his generation (Ticket to the Stars), he...

Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Ballets without Music, without Dancers, without Anything. Trans. Thomas and Carol Christensen. Green Integer, 1999. 187 pp. Paper: $10.95. Celine is the great bad boy of literature, the original gangsta, complete...

Final Exam.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Julio Cortazar. Final Exam. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. New Directions, 2000. 256 pp. $23.95. The publication of an English translation of Julio Cortazar's first novel is most definitely a cause for cheer. In Final Exam, Cortazar, as he does in...

So I Am Glad.(Review)
June 22, 2000... A. L. Kennedy. So I Am Glad. Knopf, 2000.288 pp. $23.00. The first U.S. edition of Kennedy's novel, originally published in the United Kingdom in 1985, is a quirky, comic love story, a smart and literate Blast from the Past. As the novel...

The Fortress.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Mesa Selimovic. The Fortress. Trans. Edward Dennis Goy and Jasna Levinger. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 416 pp. Paper: $19.95. What is the Fortress? To a Bosnian Muslim living in eighteenth-century Ottoman Europe, a philosophical and...

The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Richard Teleky. The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin. Steerforth Press, 1999. 218 pp. Paper: $12.00. In his latest work, Richard Teleky offers readers a poignant tale of self-realization. Set in a present-day Paris more gritty and realistic than...

On Overgrown Paths.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Knut Hamsun. On Overgrown Paths. Trans. Sverre Lyngstad. Green Integer, 1999. 244 pp. Paper: $12.95. This swan-song memoir is the latest of Sverre Lyngstad's admirable translations of Hamsun's work into English, all of which vividly convey...

The Verificationist.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Donald Antrim. The Verificationist. Knopf, 2000. 179 pp. $21.00. Tom, the narrator of Donald Antrim's latest novel, is a clinical psychologist, faculty member at the Krakower Institute, advocate of its Young Women of Strength teen...

Cape of Storms.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Nina Berberova. Cape of Storms. Trans. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 1999. 256 pp. $23.95. Does the original name of the Cape of Good Hope explain early failures to sail around it? A different storm that cannot be circumnavigated...

Enchanted Night.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Steven Millhauser. Enchanted Night. Crown, 1999. 109 pp. $17.00. Millhauser's latest offering is a lean novella consisting of seventy-four short, titled prose sections. Through these Millhauser chronicles a moonlit summer night in...

Toxicology.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Steve Aylett. Toxicology. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999. 160 pp. Paper: $12.95. This energetic short-story collection by London-born Steve Aylett uses satire and fantasy to flag the pressures that impinge on contemporary consciousness:...

Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Patrick Chamoiseau. Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. Trans. Linda Coverdale. Foreword by Edouard Glissant. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 226 pp. $25.00. It is impossible not to like Patrick Chamoiseau's first novel, Chronicle of the Seven...

We Can Report Them.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Michael Brodsky. We Can Report Them. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999. 356 pp. Paper: $16.95. In his tenth work of fiction, Michael Brodsky reveals why he continues to be an experimental writer of interest. Unlike an earlier piece, ***: A...

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Evelyn Waugh. The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh. Little, Brown, 1999. 536 pp. $29.95. This comprehensive collection of short fiction by the acclaimed British author of Brideshead Revisited demonstrates his virtuosity and his willingness...

More than One Life.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Miloslava Holubova. More than One Life. Trans. Alex Zucker with Lyn Coffin and Zdenka Brodska. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 104 pp. $22.95. More than One Life is Holubova's first novel to be translated into English from the original...

Daughter of Fortune.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Isabel Allende. Daughter of Fortune. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. HarperCollins, 1999. 432 pp. $26.00. Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read female writers from Latin America. Her trademark style of a popularized magical realism...

Ghost Quartet.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Richard Burgin. Ghost Quartet. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 320 pp. $25.95. Until reading Richard Burgin's Ghost Quartet, I never understood how "economic novels," those Japanese novels centered on corporate ladder climbing, could be so...

Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Ilan Stavans, ed. Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another. Duke Univ. Press, 1999. 326 pp. Paper: $17.95. Stavans uses an epigraph from Eugene O'Neill: "Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are...

Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Richard Poirier. Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. 318 pp. $25.00. Two important themes that have run through Poirier's previous criticism unify this excellent, if disparate,...

Leslie Fiedler and American Culture.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin, eds. Leslie Fiedler and American Culture. Univ. of Delaware Press, 1999. 199 pp. $36.50. This is a welcome Festschrift in honor of Leslie Fiedler, long a lightning rod in the study of American culture and...

The Arcades Project.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1999. 1,073 pp. $39.95. A truly monstrous book, Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project is an attempt to write a non-narrative history of the nineteenth century, a...

Nabokov's "Pale Fire": The Magic of Artistic Discovery.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Brian Boyd. Nabokov's "Pale Fire": The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton Univ. Press, 1999. 303 pp. $30.00. Boyd, the distinguished biographer of Nabokov, believes that Pale Fire is a masterpiece, a text that must be read many times....

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.(Review)
June 22, 2000... Dave Eggers. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Simon & Schuster, 2000. 375 pp. $23.00. Yes, the title does make some startling claims, but for the most part, Eggers meets them. "Based on a true story," much is made in the preface...

Books Received.(Bibliography)
June 22, 2000... Alberto, Eliseo. Caracol Beach. Trans. Edith Grossman. Knopf, 2000. $25.00. (F) Alcalay, Ammiel. Memories of Our Future. Intro. Juan Goytisolo. City Lights, 1999. Paper: $17.95. (NF) Algosaibi, Ghazi. Seven. Trans. Basil Hatim and...